inrich consulting

A busy month for Cisco unified communications

Cisco has been busy over the last month bolstering and adjusting it’s unified communications offerings. Their key announcements include:

On the 25th of September Version 7 of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) IP Telephony platform was released. This release is key for companies also considering deployment of Microsoft Office Communicator as it brings a feature called SIP Forking which allows an inbound call to a CUCM endpoint to simultaneously ring an associated Microsoft Office Communicator endpoint… in effect unifying your Cisco and Microsoft voice capabilities.

On the same day as the above announcement, Cisco Webex Connect was launched (see image), providing a major enhancement on Webex to provide a Software As A Service model for web conferencing, document sharing, presence, chat, voice and video communications. The key selling points other than SAAS model is the ability to connect with users both inside and outside your organisation through the hosted infrastructure and the ability to integrate with business applications. Follow this link for a free trial… I will need to do a review on this product soon!

On the 19th of September Cisco announced the acquisition of Jabber an open standards based presence and Instant Messaging platform. Both these areas are not strong on the Cisco platform; for example Instant Messaging is not possible between Cisco mobile phone clients (Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator) and Cisco desktop clients (Cisco Unified Personal Communicator). Jabber may well be a strategy to plug existing gaps and enhance future functionality for the Cisco IP Telephony platform and perhaps the hosted Webex Connect platform too.

Just one day before the Jabber announcement Cisco completed the acquisition of PostPath a hosted email and calander product. The obvious extension of this acquisition is integration into the Cisco Webex Connect SAAS offering.

Rather than solely relying on partners and often competitors to assist in providing a unified communications suite Cisco appears to be acquiring the capabilities it does not have. The key differenentiator with the newly acquired capabilities is provision using Software As A Service model. Given these developments no doubt SAAS will become a more viable consideration for providing communications services… watch this space.

Entry Filed under: unified communications