Unified Comms 6.0 also sees a variety of name changes for some well-known products from the San Jose, California-based networking heavyweight. CallManager, its IP PBX, becomes Cisco Unified Communications Manager, or simply UCM, though one suspects it will take the market a while to drop the former moniker entirely.
As a result, the SME version of the IP PBX, formerly CallManager Express, has now become UCM Business Edition, and indeed, is one of the other highlights of the v6.0 release. Rick Moran, VP of UC marketing at Cisco, said the three main themes of the new version of the portfolio were mobility, SME and collaboration.
On the mobility front, there were a series of announcements, in fact, including the launch of a new WiFI phone, the 7921G, supporting 802.11a, b and g radios, incorporating version 4 of the proprietary Cisco Compatible Extensions (CCX) technology for purposes of QoS.
Then there is the Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator client, which is the first Cisco-branded version of the Orative client for Symbian, BlackBerry, WM5 and, shortly BREW cellphones, enabling a variety of fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) services. Moran cited the ability to transfer calls between a mobile phone fitted with the UMC and a deskphone, simply by pressing a button to carry out the transfer.
Then there is the possibility of running a directory on the mobile device that can be tied to a directory server in a corporate network that, together with the presence capability inherent in UMC, means users can place calls knowing the person is available.
There is also the potential for interaction of the UMC-fitted phone with Cisco’s MeetingPlace collaboration platform and, finally, integration with the vendor’s Unity voicemail server. You can have your voicemails sitting on the Unity server and choose which of them you want to listen to on your mobile phone, Moran explained. They will then be streamed to the phone over the cellular network’s data signalling channel.
As such, he went on, the system is agnostic as to whether the cellular network is 2G or 3G, GSM or CDMA, though of course the later generations mean faster data rates. Furthermore, the mobile carrier simply sees the traffic as a data transmission, even though it may be a series of voicemails. It’s an over-the-top data application, said Moran.
The UMC is a SIP client, and indeed, Cisco rewrote all its IPT offerings in the open source protocol when it became Unified Comms last year. The Cisco VoIP clients running on Nokia Eseries phones are actually still running Cisco’s proprietary SCCP protocol but are expected to be ported across to SIP in due course.
On the SMB front, the main announcement is the UCM Business Edition, a single-server version of the IP PBX aimed at 100-500-user environments. It comes with all the connection functionality, as well as Unified Mobility [i.e. the ability to support the UMC client] and a presence server, with the capacity to federate presence information with any device supporting the SIP/SIMPLE standard, said the exec. Collaboration and call center capabilities can also be added into Business Edition, though these areas of functionality will be charged separately.
The Unity Connection 2.0 voicemail and presence server is an integral part of Business Edition, and Moran said Unity has gained a number of new features. These include voice recognition technology, such that calls can be pulled out of voicemail based on subject, and security with PKI technology, whereby a voicemail can be tagged as private, in which case it cannot be forwarded. You can also set a key expiration date, beyond which the recipient won’t be able to hear the voicemail, he went on.
As for collaboration, the desktop client within Unified Communications, called the Unified Personal Communicator, already offered speed dial, presence, click-to-voice message and click-to-conference, and now instant messaging (IM) has been added, together with the ability to escalate a session from IM through to a video conference, for instance.
MeetingPlace, which is now called Unified MeetingPlace and is also at version 6.0, has been enhanced in this version to include a Flash-based Web conferencing capability, enabling richer graphical material to up- and downloaded. Version 6.0 also comes with the ability for Cisco’s very high-end TelePresence conferencing room environment to be integrated into a MeetingPlace meeting.
Work is also underway to enrich integration between the Cisco collaboration environment and those of IBM (Sametime) and Microsoft (Office Communications Server), since these two companies between them control the lion’s share of the corporate email server market, which is one place from which collaboration naturally evolves.
Thus anyone who right-clicks within an IM session with a Microsoft Office Communicator client can now IM a Cisco UC user, while Unity voicemails can now appear within Sametime. We’ve also done some work with Jabber [the open source messaging standard alternative to SIP SIMPLE], MeetingPlace and out Unified Comms portfolio for customers in the financial sector, Moran went on.
