Cisco Announces Major Advance with Video Telephony Solution

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Mar 2004

Cisco Systems has come up with new products and solutions for its IP Communications system that take full advantage of a converged voice, video and data network. Included are a new video telephony solution and conferencing, security and system migration enhancements powered by Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data).

The introduction of Cisco CallManager release 4.0, the Cisco IP PBX, features a new desktop productivity solution called Cisco Video Telephony (VT) Advantage release 1.0. Cisco VT Advantage allows real-time person-to-person video sessions to be added transparently to telephone calls.

With Cisco VT Advantage and Cisco CallManager 4.0, users can create an instant face-to-face video call with access to the hold, transfer and conference features of their Cisco IP Phone for the video-enabled telephone call. Cisco VT Advantage uses the flexibility of IP to provide broadcastquality video and sound.

Orange Caribbean, part of the Orange Group, one of the world's largest mobile communications companies with operations in 19 countries, has been using CallManager 4.0 and Cisco VT Advantage to communicate across the islands of Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, French Guyana and the Dominican Republic. Executive feedback on the technology has been positive.

"Putting a face on certain core business communications improves decision making," said Orange Caribbean Chief Information Officer Patrick Raimond. "It is really easy to use. It runs on existing desktop tools so you don't need to get used to a new machine, and it is relatively low on bandwidth. The image is as clear as seeing someone in person, so it has already cut our travel cost significantly. Our next step will be to extend our experience with the technology to our customers through our converged service portfolio."

Cisco VT Advantage interoperates with multiple new and existing desktop and room-based videoconferencing systems. The solution integrates a Cisco IP Phone with an associated personal compute. Cisco VT Advantage application software coupled with a Cisco universal serial bus (USB) camera makes the personal computer video-telephony ready.

For other applications, the same video calls can be made using Cisco VT Advantage with new personal and conference room video systems from Tandberg.

New security enhancements in Cisco CallManager 4.0 extend the capabilities of the Cisco network to better protect Cisco IP Communications systems. New industry-standard digital certificates confirm the identity of network devices to protect against entry of rogue system users and new standards-based encryption has been added to CallManager 4.0 providing end-to-end privacy in voice communications.

Business resilience has also been enhanced with the new Cisco Security Agent (CSA), which is a key component of Cisco's overall security strategy. CSA provides proactive and adaptive threat protection for Cisco IP phones, servers and desktop computing systems. It brings together multiple levels of security functionality by combining host intrusion prevention, authentication to Cisco IP phones, distributed firewall, malicious mobile code protection, operating system integrity assurance, and audit log consolidation all within a single agent package.

With new native support for Q.SIG and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling in CallManager 4.0, the Cisco IP Communications system can interoperate with systems from the past and systems of the future. Q.SIG, the world wide signaling standard for private branch exchange systems, provides CallManager 4.0 customers worldwide with the ability to interoperate with existing legacy PBX equipment and financial systems.

Support for SIP allows CallManager 4.0 to interoperate with a variety of current and future communications systems as well, including Cisco MeetingPlace, the Cisco BTS 10200 softswitch, and Cisco and third party SIP proxy servers.