Cisco Brings More Services and Solutions to the Cloud
Cisco Brings More Services and Solutions to the Cloud by UCStrategies Staff
Cisco is enhancing its cloud services in an effort to provide a more advanced suite of cloud offerings. Stocking up its one-stop shop for collaboration solutions, Cisco customers can now access enhanced telepresence, Web conferencing, unified communications (UC) and contact center solutions on the cloud. All services are available as a pay “as-a-service” model.
The focus was on open standards and broad customization as Cisco rolled out the new offerings at the Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles this week. Launching in the fourth quarter, the tools aim to provide service providers, system integrators, resellers and wholesalers with more options on how to package, deliver and interface with the services.
The goal of the more extendible, feature-rich platform is to provide end users with broad options to configure collaboration offerings to meet their business needs. The expanded collaboration services – running on Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) and supported by Cisco’s CloudVerse to manage and build cloud solutions – can be delivered on public and hybrid hosted, and private on-premise clouds.
“We’re seeing exceptional growth and adoption across our collaboration cloud offerings,” said O.J. Winge, senior vice president of Cisco’s collaboration technology group of the strong lead the company has established in collaboration tools. The enhancements are aimed at ensuring Cisco’s continued competitiveness as more advanced cloud solutions hit the market. “More than half of the world’s leading service providers have adopted Cisco’s HCS solution. We feel it’s about choice. And, it’s ultimately about providing exceptional end user experiences, regardless of the deployment model.”
In telepresence, "rendezvous" conferencing allows real-time collaboration sessions on-demand with employees, customers, partners and suppliers without the need to make meeting reservations with the service provider in advance. Interoperability enables communication across any network or platform. By integrating Cisco TelePresence Exchange (CTX) with the HCS cloud platform, telepresence and videoconferencing can be easily managed and scaled by service providers across a unified customer database. In addition, multiple locations can be connected at the same time. The hosted model allows partners to buy or lease the endpoints from the solution provider.
With a Jabber client and extend and connect feature, Cisco continues to improve upon unified communications in the cloud via HCS. All of the popular UC features including instant messaging and desktop sharing are present. In addition, using the Jabber client on a Windows PC, customers can port third-party phone numbers into the UC cloud-based system. The IP Multimedia System provides Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) improving integration between enterprise and mobile networks, and providing voice services over 4G.
Ciscos’s contact center management on the cloud enables the scalable management of multiple contact centers. To improve agent productivity, a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop can provide a customized experience, allowing call agents easy access to all of the information they require.
The upgrades to Cisco WebEx Meeting Server will make this already popular videoconferencing software even more useful to enterprises. Meeting enterprise demand for more internal control, cloud hosting of meetings is now possible on-premises, as well as the public cloud. The newly released Cisco WebEx Meetings Server enables the management of the online collaboration tool in an enterprise data center, facilitating in-house management of conferencing solutions.
WebEx is no slouch in the virtual meeting space. The device friendly meeting technology hosts over 428,000 meetings per day over PCs, Macs, iPhones and iPads. UC hosting on the cloud integrates IP telephony conferencing, and with the help of the Jabber client an instant messaging session can be turned into a live web conference on demand. To date, there have been 2.7 million mobile downloads of the WebEx collaboration platform to iPhone and Android devices, helping to drive growth of 38 percent to 6.8 million users over the last year.
The cloud enhancements are welcome news to the service providers and partners who sell Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solutions, whose number doubled to 68 over the last year. (CL) Link