As part of today's portfolio announcement at Cisco's 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® 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 Presence 8.0
• 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. This capability provides users with flexibility and a choice of endpoint standards, as well as a messaging platform for developing new business applications. XMPP is widely used in the industry as a person-to-person, person-to-application, and application-to-application messaging protocol. Also available is interdomain federation across companies and deployment models.

Innovative and interoperable communications

• Cisco Unified IP Phones
• The new Cisco Unified IP Phone 9900 and 8900 Series are introduced with support for interactive business video, Wi-Fi, USB and Bluetooth on selected models. Benefits include a lower total cost of ownership and an earth-friendly design that takes advantage of recyclable plastics and deep-sleep options. The 9900 and 8900 Series join the recently introduced 6900 Series, an affordable line of voice-oriented devices.
• Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator
• The latest version brings the enterprise unified communications environment to iPhone and BlackBerry smartphone devices, providing dial-via-office, corporate directory and call-log access, and presence capabilities to improve user productivity and reduce costs. This solution complements the recently announced voice over Wi-Fi available on Nokia smartphones when associated with Cisco Unified Communications.
• Cisco Unified Client Services Framework
• This flexible client architecture allows Cisco Unified Communications services -- such as softphone, voicemail and high-definition desktop video -- to work with a wide variety of clients, including Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco WebExTM Connect and Microsoft Office Communicator.
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition
• This product provides SIP aggregation services for legacy PBXs, devices, and applications, as well as connectivity to fixed and mobile carriers via SIP trunks.  The Session Management Edition allows organizations to more rapidly deploy new unified communications and collaboration applications and to cost-effectively phase in an updated communications infrastructure.

Flexible deployment models

• With Cisco Unified Communications System 8.0, Cisco introduces the ability to deploy unified communications applications in a virtualized environment on the Cisco Unified Computing System. Support is introduced across the Unified Communications portfolio, including Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0, Cisco Unity and Unity Connection, Cisco Unified Presence, Cisco Unified Mobility Advantage, the Cisco Unified Contact Center Express and Enterprise versions, Customer Voice Portal, and Cisco Unified Communications Management Suite.

• Cisco Unified Communications Large Enterprise System
• A new offering for distributed customer environments of more than 30,000 users combines the market-leading Cisco Unified Communications Manager with integrated provisioning and administration tools. It is interoperable with legacy PBXs for easy migration of legacy systems, applications and business processes, thus accelerating deployment and reducing operational costs.

Compelling, integrated user and customer experiences

• Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 8.0
• This multimedia desktop client application provides instant access to Cisco Unified Communications services such as integrated softphone, presence, enterprise instant messaging, visual voicemail, directory access, communications history, desk phone control and video and Web conferencing all with an intuitive user interface, wideband audio and high-definition video.
• Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP)
• With CVP, contact centers can offer customers speech and video-enabled self-service in a stand-alone interactive voice response system. The product can also be fully integrated with the contact center. The new version includes a courtesy callback feature, allowing customers seeking assistance to request an automatic callback once a customer service representative becomes available, rather than waiting in a queue.

Source: www.cisco.com