Telecom Lead India: Cisco announced new capabilities for
the Cisco Unified Communications Manager platform.
Cisco UC Release 9.0 features the following key
advancements:
Cisco Unified Communications Manager feature
called Extend and Connect works with Cisco Jabber is designed to
bring any third-party phone — including phones at hotels, airports, convention
centers, or even far-flung places like offshore oil rigs or cruise ships
sailing half way around the world — into the Cisco UC environment.
With Extend and Connect, telecommuters and business
travelers 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 all voice traffic directly to that phone
number.
This allows the worker to use any third-party phone but
get the experience of using a full-featured enterprise phone, so they can enjoy
all the communications services they have at the office while they’re on the
road, such as presence, IM and click-to-call. Extend and Connect can maintain
excellent voice quality at all times without being dependent upon the quality
of the broadband link.
“Enterprise IT managers want to address user demands
for access to collaborative technologies on a variety of devices. At the same
time, resellers are looking to enable IT managers to maximize the value of
existing investments while they transition to next-generation collaboration
technologies. Cisco UC Release 9.0 does all of this,” said Thomas Wyatt,
vice president and general manager, Cisco.
Cisco believes employees at businesses globally should
have access to Cisco’s UC environment, even if those employees are not using
Cisco endpoints. Extend and Connect gives businesses a cost-effective way to
give employees access to the Cisco UC environment by allowing any vendor phone
— old or new, analog, digital or IP — to be controlled by Cisco Jabber.
Support of fixed mobile convergence gives users of
any type of mobile phone access to more desk-phone-like features, anywhere —
without the need of a smartphone, a data plan, or a mobile client installed on
the phone.
Enterprise-grade telephony features such as unified
inbox, message waiting, callback, conferencing and direct-extension dialing are
now available via a new systems interface that ties Cisco Unified
Communications Manager with the user’s mobile service provider, providing
transparency, intelligence and control beyond the realm of the user’s
office.
UC Release 9.0 delivers: better bandwidth
management via a built-in implementation of Call Admission Control (CAC).
CAC automatically creates a logical view of the network so the system can
dynamically update traffic management across clusters and locations to help
ensure optimal call quality, even during peak usage periods.
Cisco Unified Communications Manager is Cisco’s platform
to manage all collaboration endpoints; with this release, the recently
announced Cisco TelePresence TX9000 joins other telepresence endpoints
(including C-Series codecs and SX, MX, EX, VX, Profile, 3000, 1300, 1100 and
500 Series) that are also registered to and managed by Cisco Unified
Communications Manager.
Global availability of Cisco UC Release 9.0 is targeted
for Q3 CY 2012. Extend and Connect, one of the many key advancements, requires
both UC Release 9.0 as well as Cisco Jabber 9.1. Cisco Jabber 9.1 is scheduled
to be available in Q4 CY 2012.
“We’ve relied on Cisco Unified Communications for
several years, and this latest version brings several updates that answer
pressing business needs: voice traffic has increased exponentially on our
network — especially during peak times when applications are due for
enrollment and financial aid. Native queuing gives us a way to automate the
handling of those spikes in call activity. Additionally, video is becoming
increasingly important on our campuses, and URI dialing will ease the process
of placing such calls. Plus the centralized license management will save time
and effort,” said Nick Ciesinski, network architect, University of
Wisconsin.
