Cisco Unites Business-to-Business Collaboration with Exciting Offerings

Cisco has announced significant product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio, as well as entrance into two new markets, enterprise social software and hosted email, with the goal of bringing the collaborative power of online social communities to businesses.
“The new Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications, and Cisco WebEx solutions raise the bar for inter-company collaboration by delivering rich video, voice, and presence capabilities across and between organizations” said Owen Inyang, Cisco marketing manager, Africa and Levant.
Among the new unified communications products offered now are technologies which help enable secure business-to-business communications over any IP network offering differentiated capabilities for service providers.
Some of these are the new Cisco enterprise instant messaging (IM) and presence solutions powered by Jabber XMPP  which helps people quickly find, connect and collaborate with colleagues inside and outside their organization.
Another of Cisco’s offerings is the Cisco-hosted directory of organizations and locations with Cisco TelePresence, which simplifies the scheduling of intercompany TelePresence meetings. In addition, Cisco is offering new enterprise social software solutions that include a new social video system which helps enable companies to form secure video communities around user-generated content under enterprise control. 
Also announced last week were the new medianet-enabled products, which deliver better collaborative experiences for end-users across heterogeneous devices, applications and clients. A medianet is an intelligent network optimized for rich media.
The new product introductions are offered to customers as on-premise, on-demand or software-as-a-service solutions, or blended approaches, and can be deployed on a sliding scale of consumption based on business process needs, rather than information technology constraints.
“There are a few key trends that are creating a need for organizations to change the way they operate - globalization, consumerization of IT, information overload, and increased worker mobility,” added  Inyang. “Cisco’s collaboration strategy and portfolio is designed specifically to enable this new way of working. Solutions can be implemented on-premise, taking advantage of existing infrastructure, or via a hosted SaaS solution or a combination of the two. They can be deployed in any order and at a pace that matches a company’s business objectives.”