Cisco Expands Technology Portfolio for Small Businesses

Cisco has announced the expansion of its small business product portfolio with the introduction of new wireless access points, routers, switches, partner-managed service offerings, and of course, unified communications. With these new solutions, Cisco hopes to increase customer productivity and growth and ensure that businesses of any size can match the needs of their customers by staying connected with a reliable network.

With the new suite of networking and communication offerings, Cisco continues towards its goal of providing reseller partners with a complete portfolio of purpose-built products and solutions for their customers’ needs. It will enable partners to capture the ever-increasing demand for outsourced IT services by extending the cloud-based partner managed service offerings of the Cisco OnPlus Service with new wireless network management tools and capabilities.

Included among the new products and solutions are the Wireless Access Points 121 and 321, the Cisco RV180 and RV180W Wireless-N VPN Routers, and the Cisco Small Business 500 Series Stackable Managed Switches. The Cisco UC320 Unified Communications system includes an integrated wireless access point, Gigabit WAN connectivity, an analog phone and fax port, and an integrated 4-port switch, while supporting up to 24 phones with voicemail, auto attendant, and more. There's also the Cisco OnPlus Service, which automatically discovers all devices connected to a network and provides remote management of Cisco solutions, as well as provides extensive reporting on wireless devices and traffic to maintain strong connectivity.

"Mobility and the cloud together truly levels the playing field for SMBs to benefit from UC just as much as enterprises," says Jon Arnold, Principal of J Arnold & Associates and UC Expert at UCStrategies. "Given the explosion of smartphones and tablets, this new portfolio should generate more SMB traction for Cisco than previous efforts to crack this market, which they have long sought to gain a foothold in. Just to be sure they succeed this time, they're offering financing from Cisco Capital, and that should make it easier for resellers and operators to bring cloud-based UC to their SMB customers."

For more information, visit www.cisco.com.