Cisco has launched a massive offensive on the collaboration space with the addition of 60 product enhancements, including its first commercial push into enterprise social networking.
Underpinning the launch is Cisco’s desire to arm customers with video and embed it with voice and real-time communications to connect people rather than documents.
“We believe collaboration is the mega trend of the decade. The 90s were the Information Age and now it’s the time of collaboration. Collaboration is to the enterprise what social networking is to consumers,” said Amanda Jobbins, vice President – technology & corporate marketing Europe at Cisco.
On the social networking side, Show and Share creates a social video system. Members of the video communities can record, edit and share video and incorporate taggings and RSS feeds. Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform arms users with the ability to create ad hoc teams using real-time voice, instant messaging and video while incorporating traditional documents.
“What we want to do is move collaboration from being document-centric with blogs or wikis and really use the network as a platform to connect information and people in a simple and easy way,” said Tim Stone, Cisco head of collaboration solutions.
Other highlights include the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine, which enables business-to-business communication over the internet. The software recognises if someone using a standard telephone has the Intercompany media engine and will route all subsequent calls over the internet, bringing potentially huge cost savings.
Using technology gleaned from its PostPath acquisition, customers can take advantage of the cloud and outsource their email communications and storage using Cisco WebEx Mail.
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Together with its collaboration announcements Cisco launched Unified Communications version 8, adding support for high-definition video and Cisco’s Unified IP phones.
