* Cisco sketches out three levels of mobile convergence
At its analyst conference last week in San Jose, Cisco shed some light on its mobile convergence progress. The company’s strategy can be considered a subset of its year-old “network is the platform” vision, a notion that, in part, encourages furthering collaboration as a network-centric business process.
Convergence at the application level is falling under the auspices of a new organization within Cisco charged with knitting together all the company’s software efforts, which were previously stove-piped throughout the company. It is also opening up Cisco IOS router services to third parties, the company announced last week.
From there, Cisco intends to integrate its own and others’ IOS-based collaborative applications with its WebEx Connect on-demand platform and with the Cisco Unified Communications suite of applications, said Edison Peres, Cisco VP of worldwide channels during a panel session about creating Web 2.0 ecosystems.
“The network” that is the platform in the Cisco vision for all this collaboration encompasses not only wired networks but mobile networks. Lynn Lucas, a director in Cisco’s enterprise central marketing organization, explained to me last week that Cisco sees three primary levels of converged mobility, two of which are available now.
* Level one: single-number reach: This basic convergence function enables multiple handsets to ring when a single business number is called with no special software client required. Previously requiring a separate server product, it now has been integrated into Version 6.0 of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (formerly CallManager), Cisco’s unified communications platform.
Collapsing multiple phone numbers into one extension aims to avoid phone tag and having to dial multiple numbers to reach someone. Formerly called Mobile Connect, Cisco has renamed its single-number reach feature Unified Mobility. It is the form of mobile convergence most likely to be used by the broadest set of users within an organization, Lucas predicted.
* Level two: Cisco Unified Communications: This level, which is based on technology that Cisco acquired when it bought Orative, adds unified message mailboxes, video mail and presence capabilities for mobile users on top of single-number reach. It requires the use of a smartphone running Cisco client software. Today, Cisco Unified Communications runs on Research In Motion BlackBerry and Nokia E-Series handsets. Windows Mobile-based devices will be supported next year, said Lucas.
* Level three: Seamless Wi-Fi-to-cellular handoff and roaming: Here, Lucas said only that this capability is primarily of interest for cellular-offload cost savings to enterprises outside the United States, where usage fees are metered and inter-country roaming charges exorbitant. Many U.S. users, by contrast, are on a flat-fee-per-month cellular rate plan whether they are using the network or not, she said (though David Dorosin, a product marketing director at Nokia, countered in a session later in the day that “flat rates are not as established in enterprises as with consumers”). Lucas also indicated that the dual-mode phone experience in general needs to improve before layering seamless roaming on top of it.
