Cisco Unveils New Products to Support Unified Communications and Mobility

Cisco (News - Alert) is helping companies adopt unified communications (UC) and mobility with a number of products that deliver effective communication and collaboration between employees.

As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) gains momentum across all industry verticals, companies are required to devise remote working policies which impact their existing or planned collaboration strategy. The surge of employee friendly smartphones and tablets has created a need for them to adopt a collaboration strategy that can accommodate the needs of employees who want to stay updated at all times.

Cisco is committed to help organizations adopting BYOD and remote working. With this purpose, the company has announced a number of audio and Web conferencing tools, instant messaging and presence that support the latest mobility trends in organizations.

Cisco Expressway is one of the latest products announced by Cisco. The product enables UC tools to extend beyond the office network, to mobile and home workers. Thanks to the Transport Layer Security implemented in Expressway, remote access to conferencing and messaging tools will no longer need to be achieved by static VPNs, which require registrations and passwords, the company said.

Jabber Guest plugs into Cisco Expressway and will enable companies to extend enterprise collaboration tools to trusted third parties without compromising on security or controlled access, Cisco said.

Cisco also introduced Intelligent Proximity to support BYOD in organizations. Intelligent Proximity helps employees link their mobile phones with their desk phones, giving the ability to switch calls already in progress, export contacts and call history from their mobiles onto their desk phone. Cisco DX650 Smart Desk Phone (News - Alert) is the first phone to support this technology.

Finally, to support a smooth integration between all new and old UC products, Prime Collaboration will manage “the vast majority” of Cisco collaboration products and to authorize the addition of employee-owned devices to company-based UC systems, from a single management console.

Cisco will also add new components such as Video Communications Server (VCS) and Cisco Expressway to Prime Collaboration. It will also include some components within Cisco Contact Center Solution.

Since compatibility with Cisco Prime Collaboration is now a requirement for every Cisco product that comes to market, it is to be expected that every existing application will also eventually become part of Prime Collaboration, Cisco said.

The networking major is delivering these collaboration products to support organizations’ needs to increase productivity. Employees will be more productive if they are using devices that they are comfortable using and are given the freedom to do their work when they want from where they want.