 "Cisco Unveils UC Release 9.0")
Cisco has announced a bevy of new services and capabilities for the Cisco Unified Communications Manager platform. The services and capabilities are part of what’s called Cisco Unified Communications (UC) Release 9.0 and directly address many of the key challenges IT managers are facing today as they seek to “collaboration-enable” their employees both in the office and on-the-go.
Cisco UC Release 9.0 is the foundation of a unified collaboration strategy and now supports third-party endpoints. A new Cisco Unified Communications Manager feature called Extend and Connect works with Cisco Jabber to bring any third-party phone—including phones at hotels, airports, convention centres, or even far-flung places like offshore oil rigs or cruise ships sailing half way around the world—into the Cisco UC environment.
Support of fixed mobile convergence gives users of any type of mobile phone access to more desk-phone-like features, anywhere—without the need of a smartphone, a data plan, or a mobile client installed on the phone. Enterprise-grade telephony features such as unified inbox, message waiting, callback, conferencing and direct-extension dialing are now available via a new systems interface that ties Cisco Unified Communications Manager with the user’s mobile service provider, providing transparency, intelligence and control beyond the realm of the user’s office.
The new release features better video quality, security, and usability improvements such as better bandwidth management, support for additional video endpoints and next-generation “dial by email.”
With this release, Cisco has introduced Packaged Contact Centre Enterprise, which provides an easy to install, pre-engineered, bounded, and packaged deployment model of Cisco’s enterprise contact centre software. Precision Routing enables contact centres to drive complex call-routing decisions that better match customer desires with agent attributes and competencies, without the complexities typically found in skills-based routing solutions.
With Cisco UC Release 9.0, Cisco adds historical reporting through Cisco Unified Intelligence to provide important metrics for managing the contact centre. Cisco UC Release 9.0 also adds Web chat to Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express, opening a new channel for customers to connect with a contact centre. Plus, with this release contact-centre supervisors using mobile devices can perform key tasks such as managing agent skills to impact what types of calls are routed to a particular agent.