Cisco Cisco Catalyst 6000 Multilayer Switch Feature Card MSFC2 White Paper

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Empowered Branch: Make Your Branch Office as
Productive as Headquarters

In today’s business environment, branch offices are enjoying unprecedented productivity, decision-

making authority, and innovation. This paper introduces the factors that are elevating the

importance of the branch office, the significance of transforming the branch office for your

business, and how Cisco

delivers value through the Empowered Branch.

Because branch-office employees, by nature, tend to be either customer-facing or operations-

oriented, branch offices play a vital role in revenue generation and profit making for every

organization. As a result of this crucial role in achieving corporate success, the number of branch

offices is increasing. In fact, the number of branch offices is rising 10 percent per year worldwide,

and according to The Nemertes Research Group, Inc., 90 percent of current new hires work in a

branch office. As the number of branch offices increases, employee talent grows more widely

dispersed, presenting some challenges.

Branch-Office Factors and Capabilities

Numerous business factors are contributing to the rise of the branch office and the need to

empower the many and varied employees who work there:

●

Globalization of the world’s markets: Businesses are reaching out to customers around

the world, and many have opened offices in major cities to gain a worldwide presence.

●

The trend toward mergers and acquisitions: Newly combined companies often leave

offices in their original, disparate geographic locations.

●

Cultural requirements: Most large organizations need local personnel who understand the

culture and language of a given region.

●

Desire to hire a more diversified group of employees: Many businesses like to expand

their pool of employee prospects across geographic boundaries. Having satellite offices

removes the constraints of depending on talent that is locally available to headquarters, as

well as of losing prospects who do not wish to relocate.

With the heightened status of branch offices within organizations, it is more important than ever to

equip distributed workers with the same productivity tools as their headquarters’ counterparts.

Historically, most branch offices have been afterthoughts and have received less-sophisticated

and lower-performance network technology and IT services than headquarters. One reason is that

branch-office networks are tethered to a WAN, which—until recently—has been inherently slower

and more latency-prone than local networks. Another is that branch offices have evolved

incrementally to contain inconsistent equipment and service sets across sites. This situation

makes it complex to add new services, particularly in organizations without local IT staff. However,

business conditions make it necessary to elevate remote workers’ network experience to be

equivalent to that of employees connected directly to the corporate LAN.