Cisco Broadens Foray Into Collaboration Market (Collaborative Thinking)

Highlights of Cisco's press release is below (with a link to the full release). Additional blog posts will come out later today (starting around noon PT) that will include my early thoughts. I would recommend attending the virtual launch event (webcast).

ANNOUNCEMENT DETAILS

New telepresence and unified communications solutions deliver rich business-to-business communications across organizational boundaries

Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.
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
The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine gives end-users business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximizing network efficiency and reducing costs. This new solution, submitted today to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization, includes features such as business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities, including video, with multiple levels of built-in security, and will add additional capabilities in the future. Service providers will benefit from the ability to offer new business-to-business communications services, differentiated network capabilities, and expanded managed services.
With 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 UC 8.0 also offers customers a choice of deployment models – whether on-premise, on-demand, or hybrid.
Further details about today's Unified Communications 8.0 news are available here.

Mail, messaging and presence tools

Cisco WebEx^TM Mail is a new corporate-grade, hosted email solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimized mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access. Using technology acquired from PostPath, Cisco WebEx Mail has a highly scalable infrastructure that overcomes the limitations of traditional mailbox size. Cisco WebEx Mail is on-demand, highly available, and designed to free IT departments from the burden of email infrastructure management and operation.
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. This announcement showcases Cisco's commitment to deliver standards-based solutions to drive greater interoperability across clients, devices and applications. 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 breaks new ground with enterprise social software offerings
Cisco is introducing enterprise-ready social software solutions that allow customers to dynamically form teams and communities in a highly secure manner. Cisco's technology helps enable teams to be formed based on expertise and relevance, regardless of location, and brings experts together with both asynchronous tools and real-time voice and video.

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 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. Unlike today's document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions.

Cisco offers customers new medianet-ready devices that optimize networks for video, voice and collaboration
Cisco introduced three new, network-based devices that help customers evolve their IP networks to medianets. In combination with the recently introduced Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2, customers can now enrich their existing collaboration capabilities with new, network-based functionality.

From the 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. Innovative features such as 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.
Cisco Pulse is an innovative 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.