Cisco Develops Telepresence and Provides Stronger Service

Cisco has enhanced its telepresence, Web conferencing, unified communications (UC) and contact center solutions portfolio in order to tackle collaboration in every aspect possible, and Cisco's partners will now also reap the benefits of these improvements, which will become available within the next 60 days.

Yesterday at the vendor's Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles, California, officials unveiled the new abilities and offerings for collaboration from public and hybrid hosted cloud services to private, on-premises tools. Relative to business needs and individual preferences, the new provisions are aimed at giving end-users a wider variety of choices in how their tools for collaboration are distributed.

The broader selection of services also presents options with greater appeal and extra as-a-service revenue opportunities to systems integrators, service providers, wholesalers and resellers who must deploy the service.

One of the significant offerings is to greaten the distribution and expansion of Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution's (HCS) platform and launch Cisco WebEx Meetings Server for businesses that prefer an in-house conferencing service which collects the online collaboration tool in an enterprise data center.

O.J. Winge, Cisco collaboration technology group's senior vice president, said, “We’re seeing exceptional growth and adoption across our collaboration cloud offerings... 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.”

Improved telepresence, integration of Cisco TelePresence Exchange (CTX) into HCS and Collaboration enhancements are all new for HCS. Users who favor organizing on-demand video-enabled collaboration sessions will benefit from the telepresence “rendevous conferencing,” and will not need to meet reservations. The integration of CTX into HCS will enable service providers to manage and control telepresence and videoconferencing over their customer base; they will not need to construct further infrastructure to aide each client.

Furthermore, CTX integration will allow end users to connect with a number of locations, and partners can deploy the service via a hosted model through which clients' purchase of lease endpoints and the solution provider offers back-end technology. Finally, enhancements in collaboration allow for simplified management of various customer contact centers. A Web 2.0 collaboration desktop, which is greatly customizable, will be supported by the platform and will enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of call center agents.

Updates to WebEx are the integration with the Jabber IM client (which will enable WebEx meetings to launch straight from Jabber), and an improved Cisco WebEx Meetings Server. The latter will serve customers who prefer Web conferencing that is multi-format and device-friendly, but favor on-premises services as opposed to the older WebEx public cloud platform. This virtualized software solution will be provided to users; it has been designed for Cisco Unified Computing System and offers similar video, file-sharing, annotation and collaboration experience as WebEx.

The present climate demonstrates a rapid growth for the WebEx collaboration platform, and the enhancements have become available at a ripe time. Following a 30 percent increase from last year, there are now around 6.8 million registered WebEx users. The number of WebEx meetings in August of this year increased by 38 percent to 9.6 million meetings, and an approximate 1.8 billion minutes were spent in meetings in that month alone. (CY) Link