Cisco and Citrix Get (More) Socially Responsible
Every large corporation has a certain amount of resources set aside for corporate partner education, training sessions, webinars, investment funds, all meant to stimulate research and development and so on. Cisco and Citrix are two of the members in this club, and they both some interesting news today circling their social responsibly.
The first highlight comes from Cisco, who announced the Cisco Networking Academy, the company’s largest corporate social responsibility program, reached the 1 million students/year landmark. The Networking Academy kicked off all the way back in 1997, and has grown from 64 schools to 10,000 academies in 165 countries, with a total of 4 million students to date.
Amy Christen, vice president of Cisco Corporate Affairs and Networking Academy”
“Networking Academy is truly the world’s largest classroom. The unique delivery model combines the power of the network and the cloud with the global need for ICT skills-based education to address the critical need for networking professionals around the world.”
The Networking Academy provides students a cloud-based multi-lingual learning system, classroom instructions and personalized feedback.
Cisco is making strides in the education space, but Citrix just premiered its newly formed investment fund. The company announced it has invested an undisclosed amount in Primadesk, making the first funding commitment for the Citrix Startup Accelerator. Primadesk is a developer of free personal cloud data content management solutions, and will demonstrate its technology today at the Demo 2011 conference.
The investment in Primadesk represents Citrix’s first introduction to social responsibly from the start-up stimulus angle. The company celebrated the 15-year anniversary to its IPO in December last year, and launched the Citrix Startup Accelerator program as a channel of giving back.
A company’s corporate social responsibility efforts can help maintain its community, and better facilitate ongoing buzz around its products. Either way, this sort of marketing is the best type there is, and you just can’t argue with 1 million students and growing.
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