Unified Communications: Open and Interoperable to Increase Customer Benefits

Cisco and Microsoft have a nine-year strategic alliance and have collaborated across a number of technologies, the most recent being unified communications. While Cisco and Microsoft have different visions for unified communications, there is a common theme that ties our visions together – the customer. In the spirit of that commitment to customers, we’ve identified with Microsoft a number of integration areas between our products, such as interoperability with Microsoft Office Communications Server and Cisco Unified Communications.

This week we announced support for Microsoft’s new Office Communications Server interoperability specification with Cisco Unified Communications Manager. This interoperability will allow customers to more tightly integrate Microsoft Office Communicator with Cisco Unified Communications devices, such as Cisco Unified IP Phones, and simultaneously ring them for increased efficiencies in “finding the right person, the right time – faster.”

To deliver on the “Unified” in unified communications for customers, Cisco will continue to strengthen alliances, strike new partnerships and drive industry standards. By leveraging the network as the platform for communications, Cisco customers will benefit from new levels of productivity, competitiveness and profitability over the coming years.

Communications is the ultimate networked application. Cisco believes the network is the platform for unified communications and that customers will benefit from an open, unified solution that offers communication and collaboration applications as network services. Our strategy for unified communications is to open up the workspace for customers, as this approach offers customers a wider choice of communications product and technology options, rather than a single operating system, device or media -dependent technology.