Cisco Expands Lineup
The products should expand the potential customer base for solution providers selling Cisco's IP telephony line on the high and low ends of the market, said Hank Lambert, director of product marketing for the enterprise voice and video business at Cisco.
The latest version of Cisco's unified messaging software, Unity 4.0, adds support for Lotus Domino, enabling end users to access and manage messages from their Lotus Notes inbox. Previously, the product only supported Microsoft Exchange.
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To attract SMBs, the 7905G was added to Cisco's low-end IP telephone line.
Slated for availability in December, Unity 4.0 costs $135 per user or $65 per user for voice mail.
"If there was a place out there where some channel partner felt they couldn't sell Unity because their customers were using Lotus, that is now available to them as an addressable market," Lambert said.
To help attract SMB clients, Cisco has expanded the low end of its IP telephone line with the December launch of the 7905G, which provides inline power support and a pixel-based display for $165. Previously, Cisco's lowest-priced phone was the 7910, starting at $215.
For many SMB clients, the high cost of IP equipment,and handsets in particular,has been a major stumbling block to IP telephony implementations, said Steve Fitzhenry, vice president of sales at 4Front Systems, a network integrator based in Morrisville, N.C.
"Typically, people who install IP telephony are major corporations that see the business value, but the price can be prohibitive for small organizations," Fitzhenry said.
CallManager 3.3, the latest version of Cisco's call-processing software, expands the scalability of the platform to support up to 30,000 IP phones per IP-PBX cluster, up from 10,000 IP phones per cluster, Lambert said.
To support the scalability increase on the hardware side, Cisco released the 7845 Media Convergence Server (MCS), supporting 7,500 phones per server, with four active servers per cluster.
Expected to be available in December, CallManager 3.3 starts at $3,995 when purchased in conjunction with a Cisco MCS. The 7845 MCS, available now, is priced at $39,995 for 5,000 users or $47,495 for 7,500 users.
Cisco also introduced new audio/video conferencing, contact centers and infrastructure products.