Cisco Adds Features to IP Telephony for Mid-Size Businesses While Reducing Cost
Cisco Adds Features to IP Telephony for Mid-Size Businesses While Reducing Cost by Robbie Pleasant
Cisco has recently announced a series of advancements designed to provide midsize businesses with enterprise-grade IP phone systems. The new innovations will provide IP phone systems with integrated collaboration capabilities without taking additional IT or financial resources.
Among the advancements announced are innovations to the Cisco Business Edition 3000 and 6000. These will allow customers to access collaboration offerings, such as presence, video, and instant messaging, for a low price with ease of use, configuration, and support. With this, Cisco is helping make IP telephony within the price range of mid-sized businesses; systems are available for as little as $100 per user.
Included in the Cisco Business Edition 3000, which is aimed at companies from 75 to 200 users, is increased flexibility for PSTN connectivity with reduced costs, flexibility and integration with the Cisco WebEx web conferencing solution, enterprise-class open standards platform for IM and presence, simple video calling, and simple yet effective tools for customer call handling.
"Cisco is clearly responding to competitor claims that its products were too complex," says UCStrategies UC Expert Dave Michels. "The Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 3000 is extremely simple and inexpensive IP solution. The fact they added video to it so quickly makes a lot of sense too. Dealers and customers in the mid market finally have a viable Cisco option."
According to Blair Pleasant, UCStrategies co-founder, “When the CMBE 3000 was first introduced, Dave and I wrote in a white paper that the product was limited to what we called “foundational unified communications,” and was missing some key UC capabilities. In this latest release, Cisco added some core UC capabilities, such as video, as well as integration with SIP trunking, Cisco WebEx, and Cisco Jabber. While I’d like to see the product offer its own IM and presence capabilities, it makes sense that Cisco would try to get customers to use its cloud-based WebEx and Jabber solutions.” She added, “The updated products still offer low price points for mid-market companies, as well as ease of use, deployment, and management, and should be well received in the market.”
For more information, visit www.cisco.com.