I had fun catching up with my old pal Alan Cohen, now VP of Cisco's Enterprise Solutions, to talk about all of the work his company is doing in unified communications.

We touched on WebEx (he said that we're starting to see Web collaboration, Web conferencing and presence meld together here), unified communications as more of a widget or service (so, for instance, being able to launch WebEx wherever you are), recent acquisition Securent (policy management, so you can have inter-company unified communications, seamlessly), and the new shape of presence (not just knowing that you're available, but knowing more about that person).

We also talked about federated presence, perhaps a touchy subject for a company like Cisco, which has a habit of trying to set standards around its own products rather than a true openness. You judge whether there was a real answer in there or whether Mr. Cohen did a fancy dance.