IBM, Cisco launch joint Unified Communications platform
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(InfoWorld) - IBM and Cisco will announce today at the Spring 2007 VoiceCon conference in Orlando, Florida, a joint effort to create an industrywide unified communications and collaboration platform. The expectation is that a single open platform, rather than a potpourri of platforms offered by multiple vendors, will entice a large number of developers to design communications services for the enterprise. In the first step toward that end, IBM and Cisco have pledged to base the new platform, called UC2 (Unified Communication and Collaboration), on Eclipse and OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) technologies. In addition, both companies unveiled a series of upcoming offerings jointly developed by the two companies using an open set of APIs from Lotus's Sametime collaboration application and communication APIs from Cisco. Among the solutions planned for later this year are click-to-call and voice mail integration to allow Sametime users to send instant messages to and from Cisco Unified IP phones. Another jointly developed offering will include federated presence information, call history conferencing, and video telephony. The federated presence solution will take information stored in Cisco's IP network, such as availability and location, and share that information with a Sametime client. "If you are looking at a Sametime client, you can see if the phone is not busy and if the person is in, say, building 21 on the third floor," said Barry O'Sullivan, vice president of IP Communications at Cisco. According to Adam Gartenberg, offering manager for the UC2 Software division of IBM Lotus Software Group, the growth of unified communications services has been impeded by a lack of a consistent programming environment. On the other hand, the ubiquity of Eclipse will encourage the large Eclipse community of developers to design communications services that extend the client capabilities of ERP and CRM applications to remote users. "The UC2 platform is extensible, allowing developers to create plug-ins or mini applications to access applications remotely," said Gartenberg. For example, a developer might extend an expense approval application in SAP by creating an applet that makes it available in an instant messaging environment. There is also no doubt that enterprise-level companies are eager to see what unified communications can do for them. Ray Repic, chief technical architect at Coca-Cola Enterprises, says he likes the idea of leveraging his existing technology to create incremental value. Repic already uses Lotus SameTime and Cisco's IP telephony. "There's nothing we need to purchase," said Repic. In addition Repic said he is eager to get it up into Coca Cola's prototyping lab.Â  "We need to understand how we can use voice as an application," Repic said. As part of the announcement, Cisco also said that it will develop future versions of its Unified Personal Communicator on the new UC2 client platform. Also planned is a certification program to certify that the solutions developed on UC2 platform meet the specifications laid out by IBM and Cisco. However, despite the cooperation between Cisco and IBM and the stated reasons for it, analysts see Microsoft as the elephant in the room.Â  "The unified communications battle will come down to Cisco versus Microsoft," said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. Some users have held off on the technology because they are waiting to see what Microsoft will do with it, he said. Meanwhile, Nortel Networks, which last year announced a partnership with Microsoft in this area, hasn't ended up with much of an advantage that other telephony vendors don't have, Kerravala said.
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VoiceCon Spring 2007 -- Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced new products and applications that allow organizations to use their network as a platform for more effective and more personalized business collaboration.
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Taking a product tie-in a step further, Cisco is extending its current network management OEM agreement with IBM to support its newer Advanced Network Abstraction (ANA) technology.
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A research center in Pittsburgh as well as a broadband service provider and an academic network in Japan all have bought Cisco Systems&#39;s first totally new core routing platform in seven years, which was introduced with fanfare in June, Cisco announced on
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InfoWorld - IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. plan to release a jointly developed product in July as part of an expansion of their existing alliance around telecommunications network management and service assurance, the companies said Thursday.
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Cisco (Quote, Chart) and Fujitsu will collaborate on high-end routers and other products for Japanese carriers and corporations moving to Internet Protocol (define) systems, the companies announced.
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Cisco Systems has announced new integrated services routers capable of delivering wire-speed data, voice, video and other advanced services to the small- and medium-sized business and enterprise branch office market segments.
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The goal is a &quot;single, coordinated solution&quot; that enables network administrators to control both Windows installations and Cisco network architecture, the two tech giants said.
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Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ:JNPR) today announced its participation   in an interoperability event designed to serve as a blueprint for   multivendor infrastructures offering residential IPTV, multiplay and   business Ethernet services.
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IBM Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. plan to release a jointly developed product in July as part of an expansion of their existing alliance around telecommunications network management and service assurance, the companies said Thursday.
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Microsoft's partners showed support for the company's unified communications platform with hardware and software announcements.
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It&#39;s hard to overstate how important the&#160;Nexus data-center switching platform, set to be unveiled Monday, is to Cisco Systems: for the dominant networking vendor&#39;s enterprise business, it&#39;s the biggest thing since the Catalyst 6000, which made its debut in 1999, according to the two key executives on the project.At a dinner with press last week, they compared it to the CRS-1 (Carrier Routing System), a huge switch for the core of carrier networks that Cisco rolled out in 2004. To bring that platform to life, the company developed a new version of its flagship IOS (Internetworking Operating System) software and engineered the hardware to scale up to 92Tbps of throughput. The core of the Internet is Cisco&#39;s turf, and it wasn&#39;t willing to give any ground to upstarts.The Nexus brings Cisco into not just a new territory for its business, but a new product category: a unified switch that spans storage and computing in datacenters and has security built in. Given the stakes, superlatives are natural.-- A single Nexus chassis will be able to handle more than 15Tbps of traffic ripping through a data center, up from just 2Tbps for a current Catalyst 6500 switch.-- At that rate, the switch could run 5 million concurrent transcontinental conferencing sessions using Cisco&#39;s TelePresence Collaboration system. It could also copy the entire searchable Internet in 7.5 minutes.-- One interface module for the Nexus 7000 chassis will come with 32 10Gbps ports, and the platform is designed to support future interfaces including 100Gbps.-- The company spent about $250 million on research and development for the new platform, and at its peak, the Nexus R&amp;D team numbered more than 500 engineers, according to Tom Edsall, senior vice president and chief technology officer of Cisco&#39;s Data Center Business Unit.As with the Catalyst 6000 Series and the CRS-1, Cisco developed the Nexus with an eye to long-term needs. Where the CRS marked the debut of IOS XR, the first modular version of IOS, the Nexus will have Cisco&#39;s first OS that can be fully virtualized, called NX-OS. The Nexus will also break new ground with its lossless switching fabric, a departure from traditional Ethernet -- though backward compatible with it, Cisco said.The system also represents a gamble on FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet), a still-emerging standard for sending traditional Fibre Channel storage network traffic over Ethernet. Though the new standard will probably succeed with the backing of Cisco and other big vendors, the installed base of Fibre Channel is huge, said Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala. There will be a proving period for Ethernet as a reliable, lossless datacenter transport, he said.Cisco expects the uptake of the new platform to take time, just as it did with the CRS. The first Nexus product will go on sale in the second quarter of this year, and in the first year Cisco expects to see mostly trials of the new system, said Jayshree Ullal, senior vice president of Cisco&#39;s datacenter group. Deployments will probably start to pick up in the second, third and fourth years after the introduction, she said.But just as the opportunity was huge for the CRS, as video and other traffic rose fast on carrier networks, the chance to capture next-generation datacenters is likely to justify Cisco&#39;s efforts on the Nexus line. Web-based services and applications, as well as outsourced computing offerings from Amazon.com and other companies, are powering the growth of massive data centers. Microsoft&#39;s MSN division is a test customer of the Nexus, said Ullal. Asked whether the mighty Google would buy in as well, Ullal said, &quot;I would hope so.&quot;
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Cisco completes interoperability with Microsoft security platform, forges marketing alliance with SAP.
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Fujitsu Limited and Cisco Systems, Inc. today announced that they have reached a fundamental agreement to enter into a strategic alliance focusing on routers and switches that will enable service providers
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IBM and Cisco have extended their global security alliance through the integration of IBM Tivoli software with Cisco Network Admission Control technologies to help enterprises automatically comply with security policies, then quarantine and remediate at
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Microsoft and Cisco will announce a partnership today to make the security features of their respective range of products compatible.
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Cisco(R) (NASDAQ: CSCO) today announced that the Cisco Unified Wireless Network and its outdoor wireless network solutions will constitute the wireless access network of choice for Linux and open source enthusiasts who attend the Linux Symposium in Ottawa this week.