Cisco hosts email on cloud, enters social s/w space

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cisco today launched over 60 products across all categories of its collaboration portfolio and also marked its entry into two new, enterprise social software and hosted email, markets, with an aim to bring the collaborative power of online social communities to businesses. 

Kara Wilson, VP, Marketing, collaboration solutions, Cisco Inc, said: "We are living in the participation age. The future of work is changing and organisations require new collaboration experience to navigate business complexities. Cisco believes that there is a need for better collaboration experience."

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The new products span real-time and asynchronous collaboration applications, and collectively take advantage of the power of video and voice-based communications to help enable natural, person-to-person and business-to-business collaboration across all media and devices.

Today's launch highlights:

Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory: Cisco-hosted directory  of organizations and locations with Cisco TelePresence.

Cisco enterprise social software solution: Includes a new social video system which helps enable companies to form secure video communities around user-generated content under enterprise control. 

Minhaj Zia, national sales manager, unified communications, Cisco India and SAARC, said: "The platform acts as a Facebook or a YouTube to be used within enterprises."

Cisco WebEx Mail: Cisco’s hosted email offering, based on the Postpath acquisition, allows IT to move to cloud efficiencies while leveraging their current investment in the Microsoft Outlook client, mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access.

Cisco Medianet: Medianet-enabled products deliver better collaborative experiences for end-users across heterogeneous devices, applications and clients. A medianet is an intelligent network optimized for rich media.

Cisco Intercompany Media Engine: New media processing engine solutions offer speech-to-text transcription and provide real-time video transcoding, enabling any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device, including HD interoperability for Cisco TelePresence.

Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage: Is a simple, one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing. Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage, combines the ease-of-use and broad reach of Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center

Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0: Cisco extends support for a wide range of endpoints including new video- and WiFi-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phones and additional smartphones via Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator.

Cisco Show and Share: Is a social video system that helps organizations create and manage highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimize global video collaboration, and personalize the connection between customers, employees, and students, with user-generated content.

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 easy video search and viewing.

Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP): 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.

Cisco enterprise instant messaging (IM): Using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco today announced it has integrated the XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0.

The XMPP open standard allows presence federation among presence systems, both business and consumer, as well as support for third party enterprise instant messaging clients and applications.

Cisco Pulse: A search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization.  This intelligence allows people to accurately locate and rapidly connect with the best available experts and information they need.

Cisco also introduced three network-based devices that help customers evolve their IP networks to medianets. The new unified IP phones which offer a HD voice and full VGA colour displays. Apart from offering Bluetooth and Wi-Fi support, the devices are claimed to be made from recyclable plastics and also designed to power-efficient.

Cisco Media Processing family, the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3500 and the Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600 provide real-time video transcoding, allowing any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device. It also features speech-to-text transcription of videos will help enable video on the network to become as searchable and accessible as text and web pages today. The MXE 5600 also facilitates standards-based interoperability across many video endpoints, allowing for Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with video conferencing devices from other companies.  

The new product introductions announced today are offered to customers as on-premise, on-demand or software-as-a-service solutions.