Cisco Opens Up Collaboration Capabilities

Cisco on Monday rolled out an ambitious effort to improve cross-company collaboration at its Cisco Collaboration Summit.

At the heart of Cisco’s expanded collaboration effort is a new Intercompany Media Engine (IME) that allows two organizations deploying this engine to deliver unified communications, including video, across organizational boundaries.

Submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force, it is intended to allow autonomous users to discover each other across an organizational boundary without IT having to establish direct communications links.

Alongside IME, Cisco also rolled out Cisco Unified Presence 8.0, which includes dual protocol support for SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP instant messaging and presence standards through a single appliance based on the Jabber technology that Cisco previously acquired.

Other new editions to the Cisco lineup include series 9900 and 8900 IP phones that add support for video, Bluetooth, USB and Wi-Fi support and a Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator that brings Cisco unified communications software to the iPhone from Apple and Blackberry smartphones from Research in Motion. In addition, Cisco launched a Unified Client Services Framework that extends Cisco unified communications software out to WebEx and Microsoft Office clients.

Finally, Cisco also launched a Unified Communications Manager Session Manager Edition that links its software to legacy PBX systems.

Cisco has identified unified communications as a major growth opportunity, but has taken criticism from rivals over the proprietary nature of its solutions. With this latest effort, Cisco is trying to create a more open environment that still leaves Cisco technologies at the center of an enterprise networking infrastructure that typically needs to be upgraded to support a new generation of low-latency unified communications applications.