Cisco upgrades UC offerings

Cisco introduced wide-ranging upgrades with the latest release of its unified communications portfolio at the company's recent Collaboration Summit. The Cisco Unified Communications System 8.0 includes IP applications designed to improve communication using "federated presence" with instant messaging, customer care, conferencing, video and mobility capabilities, according to a Cisco statement.

Among the upgrades are:

* The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine, which minimizes administrative overhead by learning new IP based on normal calling patterns. Cisco has taken the solution to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for standardization, promoting the idea to initially offer business-to-business video and high-definition voice with multiple levels of built-insecurity, opening the door to additional applications in the future.

* Cisco Unified Presence 8.0, powered by Jabber, provides native, dual-protocol support for presence and messaging by offering SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP on the same appliance.

* New Cisco Unified IP Phone 9900 and 8900 Series support interactive business video, Wi-Fi, USB and Bluetooth on selected models.

* The latest version of Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator with support for the iPhone and BlackBerry including dial-via-office, corporate directory and call-log access, and presence capabilities.

* The Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition provides Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) aggregation services for legacy PBXs, devices and applications, as well as connectivity to fixed and mobile carriers via SIP trunks.

* Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 8.0 multimedia desktop client application provides instant access to Cisco UC services such as an integrated softphone, presence, enterprise instant messaging, visual voice mail, and other features.

* Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP) offers contact centers customers speech and video-enabled self-service in a stand-alone interactive voice response system.

Commenting on the portfolio upgrades in a statement, Barry O'Sullivan, senior vice president, Voice Technology Group for Cisco said, "Cisco believes that collaboration will drive the next era of business productivity, and effective collaboration will not be possible without communications. We're enabling organizations to use collaboration as a key differentiator as they communicate . . . across organizational boundaries."

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.