Cisco to Make Telepresence and Video Collaboration More Affordable

Cisco, a dealer in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, unveiled new innovations, products and offerings that are designed to make the Cisco (News - Alert) Telepresence and video collaboration more affordable and easy-to-use.

This announcement, which also includes new immersive experiences, is supposed to help customers quickly and cost effectively take advantage of the transition to video across the enterprise.

Cisco Telepresence (News - Alert) powers the new way of working, where everyone, everywhere can be more productive through face-to-face collaboration. As part of Cisco Collaboration, Cisco Telepresence connects co-workers and extends face-to-face collaboration around the world. Cisco Telepresence meets the needs from team to personal use, to specific applications for the business, and even via public access. 

Cisco stated that all of its new enterprise collaboration endpoints will be video-enabled as more organizations are deploying video pervasively. Cisco estimated video communications to increase by 10-fold from 2008 to 2013 and asserted that all voice- and video-enabled offerings will interoperate natively with Cisco Unified Communications (News - Alert) Manager.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager helps business become more efficient, responsive, and creates a unified workspace that encompasses every combination of applications, devices, networks, and operating systems. This scalable, distributable, highly-available enterprise-class system delivers voice, video, mobility, and presence services. It connects up to 30,000 users of IP phones, media processing devices, VoIP gateways, mobile devices, and multimedia applications.

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. Tandberg (News - Alert) now connects to Cisco Unified Communications Manager, starting with the Cisco IP Video Phone E20 this quarter. With this, 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,” said Marthin De Beer (News - Alert), senior vice president of the Emerging Technologies business group for Cisco, in a press release. “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.”