Unified Communications

Compatible and Innovative Communications Technology

Unified communications is an increasingly important investment for organizations looking to improve productivity and responsiveness while reducing IT costs. Cisco converges voice, video, and data communications around a shared IP-based infrastructure, which simplifies making calls, sending messages, or joining audio or video conferences.

The Cisco open architecture supports all relevant industry-standard protocols, codecs, and interfaces. It currently allows for the widest compatibility with existing environments, while featuring state-of-the-art innovations that add significant value.

Broad Codec Support

Cisco supports multiple media-compression standards and codecs as built-in features rather than as add-on modules. Automatic transcoding and rate-matching capabilities help ensure the highest-quality presentation for the particular device or application.

Dual-Protocol Support

Cisco currently provides the industry’s only dual-protocol presence platform. It incorporates both SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP, which allows users to see aggregated availability information across endpoints.

Cisco presence solutions interoperate with Microsoft Lync, IBM Lotus Sametime, and Google Talk. Third-party XMPP clients can register directly to the server.

Hosted and Cloud

Cisco offers a full range of hosting options for partners as well as cloud-based unified communications options for customers. Cisco Powered Services from our partners offer the same rich user experience and capability as available on premises.

Architecture

The network-based Cisco architecture accommodates a wide variety of service connections and optimizes the experience dynamically. The architecture supports the entire solution in the cloud and is designed to overcome remote-host latency and quality problems.

Policy Management

Highly granular policy management allows considerable flexibility and control while ensuring compliance with industry requirements. The comprehensive “defense-in-depth” security framework has been proven in the most demanding enterprise environments. The end-to-end approach encompasses both the network and entire telephony system, and guarantees dial tone in worst-case, denial-of-service (DoS) scenarios.

Provisioning

The service-advertisement framework allows servers, clients, and applications to advertise and discover their services dynamically, significantly reducing IT maintenance and delays.