On October 26, 2007, networking hardware developer Cisco Systems (cisco.com) announced that Italy-based IT provider for financial institutions Cedacri (cedacri.it) has chosen Cisco's data center infrastructure to help reduce the cost of winning new customers in Milan, one of Italy's key financial centers.

Cisco said its technology will help Cedacri deliver expertise and services to financial institutions without the prohibitive cost of building a local data center and banking institutions will benefit from less expensive long-distance data communications. Cisco data center networking technology will help Cedacri establish a point of presence in Milan, linked to two existing data centers more than 93 miles away in Parma and Alessandria. Milanese banks and financial services companies will pay only for data communications to the Milan point of presence and will also have access to Cedacri's specialized banking services, including IT outsourcing, disaster recovery, business continuity and data storage via a 10GB high-speed, low-latency connection.

"Cedacri is a prime example of how organizations can use the Cisco data center network architecture to maximize existing resources to improve services and, significantly, make those services available to more customers without additional large investment," said Enrico Deluchi, operations director for the enterprise market, Cisco Italy. "Cisco network technologies help enable organizations to be much more agile because they are not restricted by the traditional costs or logistics of entering new markets. Equally, they can respond to changing business demands faster through rapid application and services provisioning and fast, highly secure access to those applications and services irrespective of location."