What Cisco’s Hosted Cloud Offerings Mean For Your Collaboration Solutions

BY MOLLIE DOBERSEK

Cisco has unveiled multiple enhancements to its collaboration portfolio, delivered via public, private and hybrid cloud models.

What’s in store for your collaboration solutions?

First off, Cisco has expanded the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). This HCS offering includes advancements spanning Cisco TelePresence, Customer Collaboration (Contact Center), Unified Communications and Mobility. With these developments you can now access an even more robust unified collaboration experience with an “as-a-service” cloud-based model.

As the number of WebEx meetings worldwide via the public Cisco WebEx cloud continues to soar, with a 38% increase year over year, many customers have asked for a private cloud solution that provides the same level of collaboration capabilities with a consistent user experience and increased internal control. Cisco has addressed this request, by offering a Cisco WebEx Meetings Server, which is designed for organizations that require or desire a fully “on-premises” conferencing solution housed in their own data centers.

These innovations have also advanced the Cisco CloudVerse, giving elements that organizations need to build, manage, and connect their public, private and hybrid clouds. The Cisco CloudVerse now includes Cloud Applications and Services, Unified Data Center and the Cloud Intelligent Network. CloudVerse is designed to help businesses realize all of the benefits of clouds with an integrated and consistent assured collaboration experience. It also provides better economics, enhanced security and improved agility.

The TelePresence advancements include several components. Meetings are now available at “your” command with a “static bridge” service option, known as “rendezvous conferencing,” that allows you to conduct TelePresence meetings at any time, versus having to make a meeting reservation. This makes it even easier for HCS customers to extend video collaboration across their ecosystem. This CTX integration also expands the reach of TelePresence by offering you the ability to connect multiple locations, including external vendors and suppliers, at the same time.

Cisco has extended many of the latest Cisco Unified Communication capabilities to the cloud:

• Extend and Connect: This new feature of Cisco Unified Communications Manager works with Cisco Jabber and is designed to bring third-party phones into the Cisco UC environment. Users can simply input the phone number of their preferred voice device into a Jabber client running on their Windows PC, and Cisco Unified Communications Manager will route voice traffic directly to that phone number.  Jabber is a software client that includes presence, instant messaging, voice, voice messaging, video, desktop sharing and conferencing.
• Enterprise and Mobile Network Connection: With IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) integration capabilities, Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities are available as well. This helps mobile service providers connect enterprise and mobile networks, offering seamless services between the two. This offering also enables operators to provide voice over 4G data networks.

For more information and details on what is available for your business from Cisco, contact DataVox, Houston’s Cisco Gold Partner at (713) 881-7407.