Cisco Reveals Visual Collaboration Solutions

Cisco, at Enterprise Connect, has introduced new innovations designed for easier collaboration at anytime, anywhere. Included in these new solutions are new Cisco Jabber collaboration applications and Cisco TelePresence systems, providing customers with new mobility options.

In their announcement, Cisco stated that they would extend the reach of TelePresence with new tools and the extension Cisco Jabber to iPad and Windows. With Jabber for iPad, mobile users receive a complete collaboration experience on the same video engine as Jabber Video for TelePresence and Jabber desktop applications. Jabber for Windows is a unified client with an intuitive user experience for point-and-click access. It delivers HD video to the desktop with H.264 HD quality, while improving performance over networks with lower bandwidth.

The Cisco TelePresence TX9000 series, a new three-screen immersive TelePresence platform, is made to integrate with collaboration tools such as Cisco WebEx, and is interoperable with standards-based endpoints from other vendors. It can accommodate six users, along with a second table for up to 18, and lets users start and manage meetings with the Cisco TelePresence Touch user interface. The TX9000 series supports 1080bp, 60 frames per second, and has data sharing capabilities supporting 1080p 30 frames per second.

"Cisco is joining other leading communication technology vendors in supporting mobile, multimodal business communications by UC enabling device-independent video, voice, and web conferencing, as well as messaging exchanges (e.g., IM, Visual VoiceMail), for business collaboration," says Art Rosenberg, UC Expert for UCStrategies. "Cisco is capitalizing on its room-based TelePresence experience to move to desktop and mobile endpoint devices with its Jabber product. They are also moving their technology to the 'cloud,' so service providers, application developers, and system integrators can quickly and cost-efficiently fill in the application gaps in existing enterprise communications and can support BYOD policies for mobility."

Rosenberg adds, "While the announcement did not specifically describe the Jabber end user flexibility for mobile voice vs.video conferencing, Cisco did confirm that they can do the following:

"'The participant from their Jabber client can choose to:

-  join the video conference with voice and video

-  join with audio muted but still send video and receive audio/video

-  join with video muted but still send audio and receive audio/video

-  join with audio and video muted but still receive audio/video

So we treat audio and video separately. '

"That means they offer 'unified conferencing,' which maximizes the benefits of Mobile UC that must deal with individual end user situations and preferences."

For more information, visit Cisco.