Cisco Expands Collaboration Platform

As network technology has spread, collaboration has become the watchword in small and medium businesses. Companies are now exchange information not only with coworkers but also with customers and suppliers. Via acquisitions, Cisco has become a force in the collaboration space and recently added more items to its growing portfolio.Cisco announced a series of products and services that move it into more direct competition with collaboration suppliers, Google and Microsoft. The announcement touched upon a handful of areas: Ciscos Unified Communications Systems Release 8.0 is deigned to support integrated voice, video, presence, instant messaging and Web sessions.

The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine automatically learns IP routes, based on normal calling patterns. Once recognized as members of an Intercompany Media Engine network, voice and video calls are automatically connected.

New Cisco enterprise instant messaging (IM) and presence solutions powered by Jabber XMPP help people find, connect and collaborate with colleagues inside and outside the organization. Ciscos Unified Presence 8.0 now delivers native, dual-protocol support for the SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP industry standards for presence and messaging, on the same appliance.

The Cisco Unified IP Phone 9900 and 8900 Series lines support interactive business video, Wi-Fi, USB and Bluetooth.

Cisco Show and Share is a social video system that helps organizations create and manage video communities. It allows organizations to record, edit and share video with comments, ratings, tagging and RSS feeds, and speech-to-text transcripts can be uploaded for video search and viewing

Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments 'on the fly' and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and Web 2.0 content.

The Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people. A virtual assistant assists with scheduling meetings between more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.

The Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage provides video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing.

Cisco has been the industrys premier supplier of networking equipment. Recently, the vendor has been expanding its niche moving into markets that traditionally were the focus of software suppliers, such as Microsoft. With the latest round of enhancement to its collaboration line, Cisco clearly had upped the ante in this space. The changing collaboration market will leave small and medium businesses with an interesting dilemma. Do they stick with their traditional collaboration supplier, which has typically been Microsoft, or move to products from Cisco  or perhaps Google?