Cisco today introduced a number of new telepresence products and enhancements as part of its collaboration portfolio designed to give customers new ways to simply, quickly and cost effectively scale telepresence throughout their organisations. The advancements also enhance “any-to-any” interoperability between Cisco TelePresence® endpoints and any standards-based devices, and make the telepresence experience even more intuitive with user-friendly features and capabilities.
Today’s announcements, combined with Cisco’s previously announced medianet architecture, advances Cisco’s objective to unlock the power of video for its customers. Cisco is making video easier to use, helping customers rapidly deploy video everywhere, and putting people back in the center of collaboration.
The “Telepresence Everywhere” Endpoint
To complement its portfolio of TelePresence offerings ranging from immersive systems to desktop solutions to PC and Mac software clients such as Movi, Cisco is introducing the Cisco TelePresence MX200. The MX200 is ideal for team meetings or personal offices and priced so that customers can telepresence-enable many rooms in their organisation. The endpoint is easy to set up with auto-provisioning and can be up and running in as little as 15 minutes. The MX200 has a list price of $21,600 with pricing flexibility to the customer based on volume purchase agreements. The endpoint is scheduled to be available globally in July.
Intelligent Conferencing Increases TelePresence Usage
As more customers realise the benefits of telepresence, the desire to engage in more multiparty conferences often grows as do requests to meet “on the fly.” While this behavior is great for collaboration, it can be problematic for administrators. How do they ensure that they always have enough conferencing ports to accommodate these requests? If there are not enough ports available, these meetings can be put in jeopardy. To solve this problem, Cisco is introducing the Cisco TelePresence Conductor. The Cisco TelePresence Conductor simplifies and scales multi-party conferencing by intelligently assigning meetings to the most appropriate conferencing unit for the best possible experience. It also can automatically divert conferences to another unit should the power go down. Additionally, TelePresence Conductor enables customers to provide their employees with virtual meeting room “ID” numbers. Employees can provide these numbers to others and meet impromptu, which can help dramatically increase productivity.
The Cisco TelePresence Conductor scales from small businesses to large enterprises. Anticipated global availability for the TelePresence Conductor is late second half of 2011.
Delivering Any-To-Any Calling with Standards-Based Interoperability
Cisco is fully committed to open, standards-based connectivity which extends any-to-any video calling to colleagues, partners, and customers, regardless of vendor. With key enhancements to the endpoint software (TC5.0, CTS 1.8), Cisco broadens its multipoint interoperability support and products designed to deliver native point-to-point interoperability between all Cisco TelePresence endpoints and standards-based third party endpoints without requiring an additional hardware transcoding device. This innovation will dramatically increase the simplicity of connecting video calls across the Cisco TelePresence portfolio and between Cisco and endpoints made by other manufacturers.
Additional Highlights
Cisco also announced a number of additional product enhancements to help customers and partners deploy and scale Cisco TelePresence throughout their organisations and provide a more seamless user experience.
Bringing Cisco TelePresence to More Users
· Cisco TelePresence Server 8710 and 7010 v.2.2, Cisco’s flagship multi-screen interoperability solution now delivers greater scalability and better resolution on more screens with support for up to 64 meeting participants in high definition (HD) (720p30) mode and up to 48 participants in full HD mode (720p60 and 1080p30).
· Cisco TelePresence Multipoint Switch v. 1.8 now supports the Cisco’s C Series and EX Series and all Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP)-based endpoints. A new auto attendant feature allows users to easily join a scheduled call from any endpoint. Additionally, scalability enhancements enable meeting sizes to increase from 48 to 90 screens, nearly doubling the number of endpoints that can participate in a single telepresence meeting. The TelePresence Multipoint Switch 1.8 is scheduled to be available in August.
· Cisco MXE 5600 (Media Experience Engine) is a video infrastructure product that now delivers real-time content sharing, WebEx® OneTouch, and recording and streaming interoperability across standards-based video endpoints from any vendor.
Raising the Bar with the Most Consistent User Experience
· Cisco TelePresence Management Suite 13.1 and Cisco TelePresence Manager extends Cisco’s innovative “one button to push” capability to the EX and C Series endpoints. This enables scheduled meetings to be started with one button, based on calendaring integration with Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes.
· Cisco TelePresence TMS 13.1 and Cisco TelePresence Manager (CTS-MAN) extend Cisco’s innovative “one button to push” calling capability across the portfolio to include the CTS, EX Series and C Series endpoints. This enables scheduled meetings to be started with one button, based on calendaring integration with Microsoft Office, Lotus Notes and other groupware applications.
· Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.6 adds native call control and session management for EX Series and C Series endpoints. With these additions, Cisco is delivering on its commitment (announced in November 2010) to establish Cisco Unified Communications Manager as the common call control platform for both voice and video, providing improved ease of use and manageability.
Quotes
Alberto Mazagatos, chief executive officer, Unitronics
“We believe the new values and the outstanding usability of MX200 will enable a massive adoption of TelePresence in large market segments. Cisco has managed to achieve a perfect balance of functionality, simplicity and cost efficiency with the MX200. This will allow us to broadly promote TelePresence across all customer segments. It’s just a homerun.”
Michael Stanton-Jones, principal architect, Communications and Collaboration Group, Vodafone Group Services
“We are working very closely with Cisco and are testing and trialling Cisco TelePresence Conductor. Vodafone is an innovation hungry company and we are always pushing the limits of technology to deliver leading edge solutions. Cisco TelePresence Conductor is in line with this strategy and it allows us to simplify multiparty video communications and to vastly improve the ease with which we administer our bridging capability. Users get simple, easy access to multiparty conferencing wherever they are and whenever they need it. This will improve teamwork and increase productivity for our organisation.”
OJ Winge, senior vice president and general manager, TelePresence Technology Group, Cisco
“Affordability, scalability, interoperability and exceptional experiences are all key to helping people use video more effectively. As these new advancements are brought to market, it’s no surprise that the latest Cisco Visual Networking Index predicts that by 2015, 1 million video minutes --the equivalent of 674 days--will traverse the Internet every second. Cisco is focused on taking telepresence, a key component of Cisco’s video offerings, to the next level by offering customers a broad portfolio of solutions designed to maximise interoperability that are simply scalable and user-friendly. We are enabling telepresence to everyone, everywhere.”
Additional Resources:
· Visit the Cisco TelePresence Virtual Launch Experience to learn about these product announcements and Cisco’s presence at Infocomm 2011.
· Collaborative Professional Services for Cisco TelePresence is a partner offering that combines Cisco’s intellectual property, best practices and smart services innovation with partners’ assets and resources to offer enhanced customer video adoption and operation.
· For more information about Cisco's collaboration news and activities, visit the Collaboration Blog or follow us via Twitter @TelePresence or @CiscoCollab.
