UC Week in Review: Cisco, TANDBERG Gear up for Merger

Welcome to TMCnet’s unified communications week in review. It was another week full of interesting news. Here are just a few nuggets that TMCnet reported this week.

 

Cisco (News - Alert) Systems Inc. the largest maker of computer networking gear, and TANDBERG, a provider of telepresence, high-definition videoconferencing and mobile video products and services, gave customers a much awaiting preview of its plans with the impending merger.

 

The companies jointly announced that Cisco plans to build “an open architecture” that will give users greater interoperability. This new architecture will offer customers such features as One Button to Push and Continuous Presence, as well as integration with leading unified communications platforms.

 

Plans also call to create a telepresence technology group, which will  build upon product lines from both companies. TANDBERG’s sales and channels organization will also become a specialist sales team within Cisco, the companies said.

 

The merger is expected to close by the first half of the year.

 

In other news, Polycom (News - Alert), a firm that specializes in telepresence, video and voice communication, announced it has enhanced its video infrastructure to spur broader deployments of visual communication and video-enabled unified communication networks.

 

As TMCnet reported, the updated platform supports a variety of visual communications and UC networks including telepresence, video conferencing and desktop video collaboration.

 

What’s more, Polycom also expanded its integrated solution for Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communications Server to simplify provisioning and management of Polycom systems in a Microsoft UC environment. This will let users easily launch Polycom video solutions from presence-enabled Microsoft applications, to easily schedule and join video meetings through Microsoft Outlook, and to support large-scale desktop video deployments, company officials said.

 

Another story topping headlines came from Global IP Solutions, a provider of HD voice and video processing solutions, which launched video chat technology that lets iPhone (News - Alert) developers incorporate video conferencing/video chat into their mobile applications.

 

With GIPS VideoEngine Mobile, iPhone developers can quickly integrate high quality, real-time video chat or multi-point video conferencing into iPhone applications. The solution is designed to resolve potential issues that IP networks have, such as delay, jitter and echo, company officials said.

 

How’s that for innovation?

 

For more about UC new, turn in next week and visit the UC community here on TMCnet.