Cisco drives video in the enterprise

Cisco has unveiled a series of product introductions, innovations and service offerings designed to make Cisco TelePresence and video collaboration more affordable, simpler to manage under a common architecture, and more available through cloud services to its customers in the GCC region.

The new announcements, which also include new immersive experiences, can help customers quickly and cost effectively take advantage of the transition to video across the enterprise.

Cisco has also announced a comprehensive desktop virtualization system and solutions comprising collaboration, borderless networking and data center technologies from Cisco and an ecosystem of leading virtualization vendors.

Cisco estimates video communications traffic will increase 10-fold from 2008 to 2013. As more organizations deploy video pervasively, Cisco announced that all of Cisco’s new enterprise collaboration endpoints will be video-enabled. Additionally, Cisco announced that all voice- and video-enabled offerings will interoperate natively with Cisco Unified Communications Manager.

As companies adopt telepresence and video calling across their organizations, having a single call-control infrastructure for voice and video that runs across a single architecture can help enable simpler deployments, improved manageability and a quicker return on investment. The Cisco Unified Communications Manager call-control and processing system does just that. Already the foundation for Cisco’s voice offerings and Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications Manager makes initiating video calls a snap with one-button-to-push technology. Endpoints acquired through Tandberg will now connect to Cisco Unified Communications Manager, starting with the Cisco IP Video Phone E20 this quarter. With this announcement, Cisco is continuing to integrate the road maps of Cisco and Tandberg while executing on a converged strategy.

“We are in the midst of a market transition to the pervasive adoption of video. Video is quickly becoming as important to the enterprise as e-business was 15 years ago. Whether it’s with Cisco TelePresence, Cisco WebEx or Cisco Unified Communications, we are making investments across our medianet video architecture to make it more accessible and easier to scale, delivering the best user experience possible. Our goal is to put people back in the center of collaboration,” said Wael Abdulal, collaboration manager, Cisco UAE.