Cisco Adds to IP Communications Portfolio
With today's lean, mean, economy in mind, Cisco (San Jose, CA - 408-526-4000, www.cisco.com) has made several additions and enhancements to its IP portfolio.
First, CallManager 3.3 has vastly improved scalability. It can now support up to 30,000 IP phones per IP PBX cluster, and up to ten clusters per system. Behind the new scalability is the new 7845 Media Convergence Server (MCS), ramping up support from 2,500 to 7,500 IP phones. Cisco's own campus (which, they say, is the largest IP communications installation in the world) has recently implemented CallManager 3.3 and 20,000 IP phones on one cluster, down from four clusters with CallManager 3.0. IT has just one system, not four, to manage, and users with extension mobility can now roam the entire Cisco campus. They've also extended PBX interoperability by adding Q.SIG support. CallManager 3.3 is available now, starting at $3,995 for software only.
Cisco has also added Lotus-Domino support to its Unity 4.0 UM product, alongside Microsoft Exchange. It also now supports the digital messaging protocol VPIM, which, as Karen Bissani, product marketing manager, explains, helps customers in the transition from legacy TDM to IP. Also new to Unity 4.0 is SIP support. Available now, at $135/user for UM software only, $65/user for voicemail software only.
On the extension side, Cisco has added a low-end IP phone - the 7905G, available now, for $165. Cisco claims it's the cheapest IP phone with LCD display out there today. It also comes standard with 802.1q VLAN configuration and G.711 and .729 codecs. Due sometime this quarter is the first version of the IP Phone Messenger, which pops IM messages to your phone and your computer display. The phone version lets you respond with a canned message or click a button to call them back. The first release will support IBM Lotus Sametime and MSN Messenger; AOL's AIM will probably make it into the second. Future releases will incorporate Unity 4.0 TTS features, says Bissani.
Cisco's also enhanced their IP Video Conferencing 3500 for SMBs, and upgraded their Cisco Conference Connection 1.2. A new web-based GUI makes managing, scheduling, and joining conference calls with IP phones easier. Most significantly, they've lowered the port increments in the pricing package to ten. Finally, for contact centers, the new Cisco ICM CTI Driver now integrates with Siebel's CRM.
ART, SVOX Join Forces
ART (Advanced Recognition Technologies, Simi Valley, CA - 805-581-3999, www.artcomp.com), a speech-rec company, and TTS software provider SVOX (Zurich, Switzerland - +41 43 544 0620, www.svox.com) have launched a unified speech interface for Symbian platforms.
ART's smARTspeak XG is a speaker-independent name-dialing device for mobile devices. The phonemic-based recognition engine also supports speaker-dependent, continuous-digit dialing.
SVOX's TTS takes up less than 1 M, also fitting within the space constraints of mobile handsets. Really cool: SVOX can mix different languages in one single sentence (e.g. "The address you requested is Buhler Technologies, Francesco Alagia, World Trade Center, Av. De Gratta-Paille 2, Lausanne"). And, boasts SVOX, theirs is the only TTS solution that lets the same voice (Nicole) speak two languages (French and German).
So, mix smARTspeak XG with SVOX's TTS, and the device itself replies when users dial by voice, speaking the text entry back for verification.
NetIQ's New Vivinet Suite
NetIQ (San Jose, CA - 408-856-3000, www.netiq.com), a company known for their systems management, security management, and web analytics solutions, has announced Vivinet Diagnostics, a diagnostics tool for VoIP.
By analyzing all network devices along the path of a VoIP phone call, IT personnel can use Vivinet Diagnostics to quickly pinpoint and diagnose call quality problems in both pre- and post-deployment VoIP environments. Since Diagnostics needs minimal configuration (the initial setup consists merely of providing the "community strings" for your routers and switches) and it automatically collects the information it needs, the IT staff doesn't have to be highly skilled in VoIP troubleshooting. For each problem being investigated, they simply provide the product with either two IP addresses or two phone numbers, representing the endpoints of the connection. The product combines network discovery, synthetic transactions, and monitoring of WANs, LANs, and network devices into a single tool.
Vivinet Diagnostics is priced at $8,000.
