Cisco unveiled significant product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio recently as it announced its entrance into two new markets, enterprise social software and hosted email, with the goal of bringing the collaborative power of online social communities to businesses, the company said in a statement. 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 organizations. “There are a few key trends that are creating a need for organizations to change the way they operate; globalization, consumerization of IT, information overload, and increased worker mobility,” said Mohannad Zaidan, senior system engineering manager. “Cisco's collaboration strategy and portfolio is designed specifically to enable this new way of working,” he said. “Solutions can be implemented on-premise, taking advantage of existing infrastructure, or via a hosted SaaS solution or a combination of the two. They can be deployed in any order and at a pace that matches a company's business objectives.” 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 organization. • A Cisco-hosted directory of organizations 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 email 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 were the new medianet-enabled products that deliver better collaborative experiences for end-users across heterogeneous devices, applications and clients. A medianet is an intelligent network optimized for rich media.
