Cisco Breaks Down Barriers To Business-To-Business Collaboration

Cisco has announced significant product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio. The company has also announced its entrance into two new markets, enterprise social software and hosted e-mail, with the goal of bringing the collaborative power of online social communities to businesses.

The new product introductions span real-time and asynchronous collaboration applications, and collectively take advantage of the power of video and voice-based communications to help enable natural, person-to-person and business-to-business collaboration across all media and devices.

New Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications, and Cisco WebEx solutions raise the bar for inter-company collaboration by delivering rich video, voice, and presence capabilities across and between organisations.

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Among the new unified communications products offered today are technologies, which help enable secure business-to-business communications over any IP network offering differentiated capabilities for service providers.

New Cisco enterprise instant messaging (IM) and presence solutions powered by Jabber XMPP help people quickly find, connect and collaborate with colleagues inside and outside their organisation.

A Cisco-hosted directory of organisations and locations with Cisco TelePresence simplifies the scheduling of intercompany telepresence meetings.

Cisco’s new enterprise social software solutions include a new social video system, which helps enable companies to form secure video communities around user-generated content under enterprise control.

Cisco’s hosted e-mail offering, based on the Postpath acquisition, allows IT to move to cloud efficiencies while leveraging their current investment in the Microsoft Outlook client.

Also announced today, new medianet-enabled products deliver better collaborative experiences for end-users across heterogeneous devices, applications and clients. A medianet is an intelligent network optimised for rich media.

New media processing engine solutions offer speech-to-text transcription and provide real-time video transcoding, enabling any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device, including HD interoperability for Cisco TelePresence.

A search platform performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time organisation-wide cross-application view that allows people to accurately locate and rapidly connect with the best available experts and information they need.

The new product introductions announced today are offered to customers as on-premise, on-demand or software-as-a-service solutions, or blended approaches, and can be deployed on a sliding scale of consumption based on business process needs, rather than information technology constraints.

The new solutions

• Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organisations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between the more than 1,000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.

• Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage is a one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing. Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage combines the ease-of-use and broad reach of Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center.

• The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine gives end-users business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximising network efficiency and reducing costs. This new solution includes features such as business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities, including video, with multiple levels of built-in security, and will add additional capabilities in the future.

• With Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0, Cisco extends support for a wide range of endpoints including new video- and WiFi-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phones and additional smartphones via Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. Cisco UC 8.0 also offers customers a choice of deployment models – whether on-premise, on-demand, or hybrid.

Mail, messaging and presence tools

• Cisco WebEx Mail is a new hosted e-mail solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimised mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access.

• Using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco has integrated the XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0.

Enterprise Social Software Offerings

Cisco is introducing enterprise-ready social software solutions that allow customers to dynamically form teams and communities in a highly secure manner. Cisco’s technology helps enable teams to be formed based on expertise and relevance, regardless of location, and brings experts together with both asynchronous tools and real-time voice and video.

• Cisco Show and Share is a social video system that helps organisations create and manage highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimise global video collaboration, and personalise the connection between customers, employees, and students, with user-generated content. It allows organisations to record, edit and share video with comments, ratings, tagging and RSS feeds, and speech-to-text transcripts can be uploaded for easy video search and viewing.

• Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments ‘on the fly’ and also offers a customisable framework for integration of legacy business applications and Web 2.0 content.

Medianet-Ready Devices

Cisco introduced three new network-based devices that would help customers evolve their IP networks to medianets.

• From the Cisco Media Processing family, the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3500 and the Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600 provide real-time video transcoding, allowing any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device. Features such as speech-to-text transcription of videos will help enable video on the network to become as searchable and accessible as text and Web pages today. The MXE 5600 also facilitates standards-based interoperability across many video endpoints, allowing for Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with video conferencing devices from other companies.

• Cisco Pulse is a search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organisation. This intelligence allows people to accurately locate and rapidly connect with the best available experts and information they need.