Cisco announces comprehensive Web conferencing solution for private clouds; provides partners with additional "as-a-service" revenue opportunities

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 16 — Cisco Collaboration Summit — Cisco today unveiled multiple enhancements to its collaboration portfolio, delivered via public, private or hybrid cloud models, giving customers more ways to access an expanded set of market leading offerings. These offerings include telepresence, Web conferencing, unified communications (UC) and contact center solutions.

Announcement Highlights:

• Expanding the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS): As the number of service providers and partners offering Cisco's Hosted Collaboration Solution more than doubled in the past year (Cisco added 16 new partners this year, bringing the total to 34), Cisco is dramatically extending the application breadth and platform depth of the solution. The HCS offering includes advancements spanning Cisco TelePresence, Customer Collaboration (contact center), Unified Communications and mobility. With these developments, HCS partners, including service providers, systems integrators, wholesalers and resellers can deliver an even more robust unified collaboration experience to their customers as an "as-a-service" cloud-based model.
• Extending Cisco WebEx Web Conferencing to the Private Cloud: As the number of WebEx meetings worldwide via the public Cisco WebEx cloud continues to soar – with a 38% increase year over year -- many customers are also asking for a private cloud solution that provides the same level of collaboration capabilities with a consistent user experience and increased internal control. Cisco is addressing this request with Cisco WebEx Meetings Server, an offering designed for organizations that require or desire a fully "on-premises" conferencing solution housed in their own data centers.

These innovations continue to advance Cisco CloudVerse™, a previously announced set of solutions that provides the foundational elements that organizations need to build, manage and connect public, private and hybrid clouds. Cisco CloudVerse includes Cloud Applications and Services (the focus of today's announcement), Unified Data Center and the Cloud Intelligent Network. CloudVerse helps enable businesses to realize all of the benefits of clouds: an integrated and consistent assured collaboration experience, as well as improved agility, better economics and enhanced security.

Additional Announcement Details:

Hosted Collaboration Solution Developments

As Cisco continues to expand HCS, a variety of service providers and partners, including Damovo, eLoyalty (a TeleTech company), Orange Business Services, NTT Communications, Telefonica and Vodafone are combining their capabilities with HCS to deliver differentiated offers to their client base. In addition, new enterprise customers including D+M Group, Devoteam and Nokia Siemens Networks are adopting cloud-based collaboration from certified Cisco HCS partners to scale and simplify communication faster inside their organizations. With HCS, customers can quickly deploy hosted collaboration offerings with minimized capital expenditures. Partners can accelerate their ability to deploy hosted collaboration offers with HCS partner enablement services. New technologies, targeted for global availability in Q4 CY 2012* (based on coverage areas of partners and service providers) include:

• Extending TelePresence Capabilities in HCS:
  • TelePresence Meetings at "Your" Command: Partners can offer customers a "static bridge" service option, also known as "rendezvous conferencing," that allows them to conduct TelePresence meetings at any time, versus having to make a meeting reservation. This makes it even easier for HCS customers to extend video collaboration across their ecosystem.
  • Maximizing Return on Infrastructure Investment for Partners: Through the integration of Cisco TelePresence Exchange (CTX) into HCS, partners can more efficiently manage the infrastructure necessary to enable TelePresence and videoconferencing, while also leveraging that infrastructure across their entire customer base. This enables partners to avoid making separate infrastructure investments for each customer.
  • Expanding the reach of TelePresence: The CTX integration also offers customers the ability to connect multiple locations, including external vendors and suppliers, at the same time. Via the hosted model, customers simply buy or lease the endpoints and the partner provides the back end technology.

• Expanding HCS for Customer Collaboration:
  • Simplifying Operations and Increasing Agent Productivity: Through HCS enhancements for Customer Collaboration, partners can easily manage multiple contact centers for customers. Additionally, HCS partners can arm customers with a highly-customizable Web 2.0 collaboration desktop that puts relevant information that call center agents need in a single, modifiable cockpit. Agents can use this information to assist callers faster, better, and with greater accuracy.

• Advancing HCS for Unified Communications (UC): Cisco is extending many of the latest Cisco UC capabilities announcedearlier this summer to the cloud via HCS. Examples include:
  • Extend and Connect: This new feature of Cisco Unified Communications Manager works with Cisco Jabber™ and is designed to bring third-party phones into the Cisco UC environment. Users can simply input the phone number of their preferred voice device into a Jabber client running on their Windows PC, and Cisco Unified Communications Manager will route voice traffic directly to that phone number. Jabber is a software client and includes presence, instant messaging (IM), voice, voice messaging, video, desktop sharing and conferencing.
  • Connecting the dots between enterprise and mobile networks: With IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) integration capabilities, Cisco HCS partners can offer Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) capabilities to their customers. This helps mobile service providers connect enterprise and mobile networks, offering seamless services between the two. This offering also enables operators to provide voice over 4G data networks.

Cisco WebEx: Private Cloud Developments and Public Cloud Utilization

Cisco WebEx Meetings Server, targeted for global availability in Q4 CY 2012, incorporates tools for effective online meetings – both in the office and in mobile settings – in a private cloud environment. This solution is ideal for customers who prefer or require an on-premises offering and, in the "post-PC" era, want access to Web conferencing solutions that work across a multitude of devices and operating systems and integrate with existing UC capabilities. Customers can also utilize Cisco Planning and Design Services with this offering. With WebEx Meetings Server, customers can benefit from:

• The same great WebEx user experience as the public cloud solution, including WebEx clients for PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad; high quality video; sharing, annotation, and collaboration tools; recording and playback.
• Integration with Cisco's UC suite that extends IP telephony to conferencing, and provides escalation from a Jabber IM session to a full WebEx meeting directly from the Jabber client (targeted for availability January, 2013).
• A virtualized software solution designed for Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) servers that is easy to deploy and manage.

At the same time, from the public Cisco WebEx cloud perspective, WebEx Web conferencing continues to see dramatic increases in utilization, also driven in large part by rapid changes occurring with today's workforce in the "post-PC" era. WebEx has noted the following increases in global utilization with its public cloud Web conferencing offering:

• Number of registered users up 30% year-over-year (Y-o-Y) with over 6.8 million registered users worldwide in August, 2012
• Number of meetings up 38% Y-o-Y with 9.6 million meetings in August, 2012
• Number of meeting minutes up 32% Y-o-Y with 1.8 billion minutes in August, 2012
• Number of mobile client downloads: 2.7 million with more than 30% Y-o-Y growth in application downloads on Apple devices and more than 11% Y-o-Y growth for Android devices

About Cisco Collaboration

From award-winning IP communications to mobility, customer care, Web conferencing, messaging, enterprise social software, and interoperable telepresence experiences, Cisco brings together network-based, integrated collaboration solutions based on open standards. These solutions offered across on-premise, cloud-based or virtualized platforms, as well as services from Cisco and our partners, are designed to help promote business growth, innovation and productivity. They are also designed to help accelerate team performance, protect investments, and simplify the process of finding the right people and information.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. Information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, go to http://newsroom.cisco.com.

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Source: Cisco