Cisco offers unified comms pack

Competition in systems for unified voice, video and data communications has increased as Cisco announced significant new packages and collaborations with Microsoft and IBM.

Cisco launched its Unified Communications System (USC), a suite of voice, data and video software for enterprises with 20 or more staff. The three main software packages in the USC are Unified Personnel Communicator (UPC), Unified Presence Server (UPS) and Customer Interaction Analyser (CIA).

The core of the offering is the Presence Server, which gathers information about users, such as whether they are using a PC, a video terminal or a phone, and forwards it to the UPC desktop client software. The UPC displays aggregated presence information as a series of icons on the client interface, allowing users to search contact directories and choose the best method of communicating – voice, video link, SMS, or instant messaging.

Cisco’s collaboration with Microsoft and IBM means that this presence information can also be “published” to third-party apps such as Lotus Sametime and Microsoft’s Live Communications Server (LCS) 2005.

Cisco offers a choice of running the system on Windows or a locked-down server appliance with a hardened version of Linux.

Cisco’s UK unified comms marketing manager, Ian Sherring, said, “USC consists of a physical network layer, the call control and endpoint layer, comprising the IP PBX and IP phones, and the comms applications layer for applications such as our Unified Personal Communicator and third-party applications like Microsoft Office Communicator.”

Research firm Freeform Dynamics recently polled UK-based IT managers, and of the 413 respondents, 20 percent said that they intended to strengthen collaboration systems in 2006, 40 percent said that IP telephony was on the agenda for 2006, and 44 percent said they planned to address the issue of mobility this year.

Commenting on the figures, Freeform Dynamics analyst Dale Vile said, “What’s really interesting is that a third of the respondents plan to be active in two out of the three areas and this tells me that the timing is right for unified communications systems.”