Cisco's UC vision a collaborative approach 10 October, 2007 By Chris Talbot

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According to Barry O'Sullivan, senior vice president of the voice technology group at Cisco Systems, the core of UC is the network itself, which the company sees as the unifying force behind the convergence of IP telephony, e-mail, instant messaging, contact center applications and other technologies.

"At Cisco, we believe we're entering the second phase of the Internet, which is all about collaboration. And the key underlying technology to collaboration is unified communications," O'Sullivan said during the Web conference.

The opportunity is huge and continuing to grow, he said, adding that if one was to take all of the separate elements of UC and add up their dollar values, the total value of the UC opportunity this year alone is approximately $30 billion (U.S.). Opportunities like that bring change in the market, he said.

"Change and opportunity like this brings a lot of change and partnerships," O'Sullivan said. He added that there are a lot of different vendors serving the different parts of the UC market, and many vendors are partnering.

Cisco's approach to UC has to do with collaboration, and collaboration is all about connecting people, no matter what device operating system or telephone they are using, he said. He stressed the importance of using standards.

"Collaboration really demands openness, and that's really a very important part of our strategy," O'Sullivan said.

Joe Burton, chief technical officer of the voice technology group at Cisco Systems, echoed O'Sullivan. He noted that over the last 10 years, Cisco has steadily increased the amount of research and development (R&D) it does in UC. In fact, one in five Cisco engineers are working on UC now, he said. In addition to R&D initiatives, Cisco has also acquired several top vendors in different technology spaces to complement its own technological development.

"Our vision is all about collaboration -- empowering people to collaborate effectively, anytime, anywhere, from any device," O'Sullivan said.

Cisco is looking at the UC market from the perspective that the network (as a platform) could bring the heterogeneous world together, he said.

In developing UC products and services (the company's focus on services grew with the acquisition of WebEx in the spring), Cisco is driving its engineers along four key design principles, Burton said.

First, Cisco is building all UC services as a set of virtualized capabilities.

"All you need is a network connection to get to our UC services," Burton said.

Second, security has become such a critical issue that UC systems are built on the Cisco Services-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA), which Burton said has the ability to provide multiple layers of protection against viruses, Trojans and other malware, while also protecting user identities and corporate data.

Third, it has to be simple and approachable so that anyone, regardless of background and expertise, could learn to use the technology.

Lastly, the technology has to be open.

"We really focus on standards, so we build our UC system on SIP, on XML, on Web services," as well as a plethora of other standards, Burton said.

The end goal is a rich communications experience on any device, he said.

According to O'Sullivan, it's the network that makes that work and really drives a better application experience.

However, while many businesses have taken the plunge into the basics of UC, only some customers have started into what Cisco sees as the next phase of UC -- the transformation of core business processes by using UC technology, Burton said.

"Our strategy is to enable people to be effective and be able to collaborate" in any environment, from any device, O'Sullivan added.