Cisco unveils new tools to enhance B2B collaboration

By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 10 December 2009, 23:13 IST   |    1 Comments
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Cisco unveils new tools to enhance B2B collaboration
Bangalore: Networking giant Cisco introduced products and enhancements across all categories of its collaboration portfolio for improved business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. The company has also forayed into two new market segments, enterprise social software and hosted email, with an aim to bring the collaborative power of online social communities to businesses. "Today, many people are using online social networks to drive businesses, hence we have introduced products to help enterprises be competitive in this space," says Kara Wilson, Vice President, Marketing, Cisco. Cisco's enterprise social software solutions include a new social video system, which can help companies to form secure video communities around user-generated content under enterprise control. "The platform acts as a Facebook or a YouTube specially designed to be used within an enterprise," said Minhaj Zia, National Sales Manager, Unified Communications, Cisco India and SAARC. The other product introductions by Cisco were collaboration applications that can take advantage of the power of video and voice based communications to help enable natural, person-to-person and B2B collaboration across different media and devices. The new Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communication and Cisco WebEx solutions aims to raise the bar for inter-company collaboration. "These products can deliver rich video, voice and presence capabilities across and between organizations," said Zia. Cisco introduced enterprise instant messaging (IM) and presence solutions powered by Jabber XMPP to help people quickly find, connect and collaborate with colleagues inside and outside their organization. New medianet-enabled products were also launched, which can deliver better collaborative experience for end users across different devices, applications and clients. Medianet is a network that is optimized to deliver rich media. The media processing engine solutions that was unveiled by Cisco offers speech-to-text transcription and provide real-time video transcoding, which can enable any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device, including HD interoperability for Cisco Telepresence. The new product introductions are offered to customers as on-premise, on-demand or as a software-as-a-service (SAAS) solution. Cisco is bullish on the Indian market for driving the sales of these new products. "India has emerged as a leading player in the IT space and today Indian firms develop software and services to their clients located at other countries, in such set-up, collaboration is very essential," says Kiran Datar, Managing Director, Cisco, WebEx Technology Group. According to Datar, the collaborative products from Cisco can also help India companies negate the lack of physical infrastructure for developing new products and solutions by collaborating with one another.