Cisco announced on Wednesday a new collaboration portfolio designed to help companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation. The Cisco collaboration portfolio consists of Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Telepresence and a new Web 2.0 applications platform, all of which use the network as the platform to help enable people to connect, communicate and collaborate from any application, device and workspace. The portfolio of unified communications, video and a Web 2.0 platform is designed to integrate with business applications, existing IT infrastructure and other Web services, and to allow developers to create new and customized applications and network-based services. The new portfolio products include: q Unified Communications-Cisco Unified Communications System Release 7.0 offers significant improvements in total cost of ownership, ease of use, and interoperability with business applications. q Video-Cisco TelePresence Expert-on-Demand integrates the immersive Cisco TelePresence experience into the contact center for high-value, in-branch customer service and the ability to summon expertise instantly from a Cisco TelePresence meeting. q Web 2.0 Applications Platform-Cisco WebEx Connect, a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that integrates, presence, instant messaging, Web meetings and team spaces with traditional and web 2.0 business applications. “Collaboration is the next phase of the Internet, a phase analysts see as a $34 billion market opportunity, and at the center of this phase is the network,” said Don Proctor, senior vice president, software group, Cisco. “Our network platform uses open standards protocols to expose critical collaboration services such as presence, instant messaging, call control and policy to a broad range of devices and applications. The Cisco collaboration portfolio leverages this network architecture to create an integrated collaboration experience, from simple text messaging to immersive Cisco TelePresence sessions.” “Having the right collaborative platform helps speed our decision making, increase productivity and improve relationships within the organization and with our customers and partners. I think our ability to collaborate is a competitive advantage for Activision,” said Mike DeDecker, network engineer, Activision. “Cisco's approach to collaboration takes advantage of our underlying corporate network to provide our teams with a seamless communications experience, helping us collaborates within the context of business processes.” With the network as the platform, the Cisco collaboration portfolio is designed to interoperate with business applications, communications devices and Web-based tools while allowing IT departments to maintain their mandates regarding security, policy and compliance. An open architecture and standards-based application programming interfaces (API) expose application and network services and support end-user customization, IT integration and third party application and hardware interoperability. Customers can create collaborative mash-ups with public Web-based tools as well as with corporate applications such as those for customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). __
