Convergence of voice and enterprise apps on call

Fresh on the heels of Cisco announcing at the VoiceCon conference on Monday it had bundled its IP communications products, it unveiled separate partnerships with Citrix and Microsoft to integrate telephony with their network and desktop applications.

Cisco said it would collaborate with the two companies on technology and marketing of advanced voice-over-IP (VoIP) and real-time communications convergence with its products.

The Cisco Unified Communications system includes voice, e-mail, text, collaboration, videoconferencing, as well as the instant messaging-like presence capabilities.

Microsoft will integrate its Office Communicator 2005 and Open Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based Office Live Communications Server with Cisco's new unified system.

The integrated technology would allow  “click to call” capability and transferring of computer or desk phone calls from Office Communicator.

The companies said presence status from Cisco’s Unified Call Manager and Unified Presence Server  would be available within Office Communicator, allowing users to switch between messaging and voice calls seamlessly.

Murli Thirumale, group vice president of Citrix Gateways, told InfoWorld.com Citrix was collaborating with Cisco to voice-enable a range of its hosted enterprise applications, such as Salesforce.com.

“These two worlds -- applications and telephony -- have largely been separate,” Thirumale said. “There are many IT managers around the world who want to voice-enable their apps.”

He said the relationship would first focus on integration of its Citrix Application Gateway and Office Voice products with Cisco’s Unified Call Manager and Unified Presence Server. The combination will provide the SIP-based user presence and click-to-call capabilities to its Voice Office product on Cisco IP telephones and enterprise applications with its new Smart Agent gateway technology.

Thirumale said the Citrix-Cisco relationship would offer firms tested, packaged solutions, without the cost, complexity and risk of custom products.

Microsoft expects to introduce its converged products in August, and Citrix expects to in the second half of this year.

Gartner Research expects that by 2010, 80 percent of companies will have integrated communications such as voice and messaging into some business applications or processes, Citrix cited.

Elizabeth Herrell, vice president at Forrester Research, said companies were looking for such integration to “eliminate a lot of the steps that slows businesses down.”

She said delays due to ineffective communications were eroding worker productivity. Better real-time accessibility of colleagues and customers, such as with presence and click to call, improved responsiveness.