(Source: MARKETWIRE)As part of today's portfolio announcement at Cisco's (NASDAQ: CSCO) Collaboration Summit, the company introduced a ground-breaking version of its industry-leading unified communications platform, featuring innovations and enhancements designed to reduce costs and increase operating efficiencies between and within global enterprises. Cisco(R) Unified Communications System Release 8.0 enables organizations to collaborate in new ways that remove barriers to communications with partners, suppliers and customers through integrated voice, video, presence, instant messaging and Web sessions.

Cisco Unified Communications System 8.0 includes advanced integrated Internet Protocol (IP) applications that allow businesses to extract more value from their communications through federated presence across devices and platforms, and through instant messaging, customer care, conferencing, video and mobility capabilities. These help enable:

--  Rich, highly secure business-to-business communications. 
--  Innovative and interoperable communications, including enterprise
instant messaging, Cisco
Unified IP Phones as collaborative endpoints, and advanced mobile
solutions. 
--  Flexible deployment models, including virtualized environments that
allow customers to use Cisco Unified Communications solutions in a hybrid
deployment on-premises and in the cloud as-a-service.  
--  Compelling integrated user experiences that incorporate video
throughout the solution and that recognize the importance of simple and
efficient collaborations with customers. 

ANNOUNCEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

Rich, trusted business-to-business communications

--  Cisco Intercompany Media
Engine
--  The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine enables effortless end-user
business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximizing network
efficiency and reducing costs while enhancing the user experience.
 Administrative overhead is minimized by automatically learning new IP
routes, based on normal calling patterns. Once recognized as members of an
Intercompany Media Engine network, voice and video calls are automatically
connected.  This new solution, submitted today to the Internet Engineering
Task Force for standardization, links users at different companies, or
between autonomous groups within an organization that do not have direct
connectivity. The Intercompany Media Engine initially enables features such
as business-to-business video and high-definition voice with multiple
levels of security built in, and will open the door to many impactful
business-to-business applications in the future.  Service providers will
benefit through the ability to offer new business-to-business
communications services to their enterprise customers, including the
ability to differentiate their network capabilities and offer expanded
managed services.



--  Cisco Unified Presence8.0

--  Powered by Jabber, Cisco Unified Presence 8.0 now delivers native,
dual-protocol support for the leading industry standards for presence and
messaging, SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP, on the same appliance.