In this post PC era, Cisco is taking another important step in advancing the collaborative workspace and making collaboration even more pervasive for customers around the world – regardless of device, application or operating system. Today we’re announcing that we are making presence and instant messaging (IM) capabilities and Cisco Jabber clients available to our Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) customers globally at no additional cost. Cisco believes that together presence, IM, voice and video call control provide the foundation for real-time communications.

For customers, with this development, Cisco is now providing a way to simply and cost effectively make presence and IM available to all users across a plethora of devices — including Windows, Mac, iPad, Cisco Cius, iPhone, Blackberry, and Android (later in 2012) — while also ensuring they’re deploying a unified communications client  that is BYOD-ready.  And let me emphasize, this isn’t just for those customers who happen to have a Cisco IP phone.  It’s for every employee in an organization.

For partners, this helps simplify and accelerate the deployment of presence, IM and mobile collaboration as part of a holistic, best-in-class, collaboration solution. Hence, presence and IM can easily become ubiquitous in the enterprise!

We feel presence and IM are the starting points of collaboration, not the final destination.

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Tags: 50 millionth phone, Cisco, Cisco Jabber, collaboration, instant messaging, IP telephony, jabber, Presence, unified communications

As we kick off this year’s Enterprise Connect conference, one subject I am discussing a lot with customers is interoperability. This topic is always evolving, but our customers’ need for interoperability has remained the same. So what are the customers telling us about their interoperability requirements and concerns within unified communications and collaboration, and what is Cisco’s approach to addressing those?

What customers want:

At its heart, interoperability is about enabling the free flow of communication across boundaries – whether those boundaries are geographical, across firewalls between businesses and their ecosystems or customers. Customers want to be able to share information quickly and easily across different systems from multiple vendors.

Customers also stress the need for protecting their investments in existing systems and extending their capabilities to new types of work scenarios. These systems include infrastructure (such as Active Directory or Exchange or Notes), voice and video systems (such as Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager and TelePresence and competitive products from other vendors), and desktop or enterprise productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office, IBM Lotus, SAP, Salesforce.com and others). They must work within heterogeneous environments and accommodate new solutions as they come to market.

But that two systems work together is not enough. They must come together as seamlessly as possible to ensure an uncompromised user experience

Finally, this all needs to happen across platforms and devices, particularly as we move toward a post-PC era of many different devices -- from smartphones and tablets in the field to desktop computers and immersive room-based systems. These devices need to be blended into customers’ existing collaboration environments while providing a consistent and compelling user experience.

This is what customers want.

What the industry needs to do:

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Tags: Cisco, collaboration, instant messaging, interoperability, jabber, medianet, post-pc, Presence, TelePresence, UC, unified communications, video, Voice

Consider me a weekend warrior of the DIY home-improvement world. My projects are likely laughable (in scope and outcome) in the eyes of the professionals, but if that’s the case, they’re not invited to my next barbeque. So there.

Granted, I sometimes experience delusions of grandeur as I envision transforming my fixer-upper into a quaint Sunset magazine-worthy before/after feature. Norm Abram will never worry about me usurping his reputation, but I like fixing things when they break and looking at something I’ve improved and knowing I did it.

I can swing a hammer and even use a tile saw, but most projects involve a lot of learning and asking questions along the way. Sometimes that’s a bit of a process – finding the answers I need or the people who have them. Read More »

Tags: collaboration, Customer Care, customer collaboration, customer service, jabber, mobility, Presence, retail, store of the future, video

Earlier this year, we announced our vision for Cisco Jabber, a unified communications application bringing together presence, instant messaging, voice, video, voice messaging, desktop sharing, and conferencing securely into one experience on any device, anywhere, and delivered through a traditional on-premises deployment, or via the cloud.

Cisco Jabber client

Jabber provides a simple way for business workers to easily and securely find the right people, to see if and on what device they are available, and to collaborate using their preferred method or device.

Last week, we took another big step in that vision, with the release of Cisco Jabber for Mac.  This release delivers powerful new capabilities and a compelling user experience, providing what we feel is the richest UC experience for Mac users in the enterprise to date. Jabber for Mac continues our commitment to bring unified communications to “any device, anywhere.”

In addition to desktop environments, we have already delivered UC capabilities across Android, Blackberry, Nokia and Apple smartphone and tablet devices and will continue to roll out additional capabilities across these platforms.  Beyond voice, voicemail and instant messaging, we have also included compelling applications for web conferencing (WebEx) and enterprise social software (Cisco Quad).  In fact, WebEx became one of the most downloaded business applications on the iOS with over one million downloads from the iTunes App Store, and Cisco Mobile for iPhone won best of show at MacWorld when we introduced it in 2009.

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Tags: Cisco, instant messaging, jabber, mac, Presence, UC, unified communications

Given the complexity of enterprise networks, solving a problem reported by a customer can often mean drawing on the expertise of multiple Cisco support engineers (SEs). But with more than 2,300 Cisco SEs worldwide, we needed to give them online tools for finding colleagues who know the right information and are available right now to offer help.

We developed these tools in the form of a “Find an Expert” application, which allows the engineers to identify and collaborate with experts who match the skills they require to solve tough customer problems. The application shows a detailed view of each expert’s skills, then provides collaboration buttons that are implemented in the internally developed case-management applications also used by the busy Cisco SEs. Read More »

Tags: CUAE, Find an Expert, Presence, WebEX