Cisco 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 organizations.
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.
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 maximize interoperability that are simply
scalable and user-friendly. We are enabling telepresence to everyone,
everywhere,” said OJ Winge, senior vice president and general manager,
TelePresence Technology Group, Cisco.
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
organization. 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.
Cisco is also 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.
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,” said Michael Stanton-Jones,
principal architect, Communications and Collaboration Group, Vodafone Group
Services.
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,” Stanton-Jones added.
Cisco is 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.
By TelecomLead.com Team
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