Intercompany Unified Communications Calls Over Internet

Cisco, at the VoiceCon conference in Orlando, announced that it has conducted the first intercompany unified communications calls over the Internet using the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine (IME), an integral part of Cisco's collaboration portfolio of products and services.

The business-to-business discussions included calls between Cisco and Australian-based Queensland Rail, and between Cisco and the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Through Cisco IME, all participants were able to spontaneously, simultaneously and with high security enjoy enterprise video and high-fidelity wideband audio from their video-enabled devices by simply dialing standard phone numbers.

Built on proposed standards that Cisco has submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force, Cisco IME enables companies to conduct highly secure, high-quality, voice and video telephone calls between companies across the Internet using their existing telephone numbers without the need to re-provision or replace currently deployed infrastructure.

Cisco IME is designed to increase collaboration throughout value chains. As businesses increasingly engage with a variety of external communities and rely upon their trusted partners to deliver results, the need to better collaborate across corporate network boundaries is paramount. The goal of Cisco IME is to allow organizations already realizing the benefits of video telephony and other advanced unified communications features internally to now extend those capabilities externally to similarly equipped customers, suppliers and strategic partners.

Cisco IME is based on a "self-learning" technology, one that learns new routes based on calling patterns and automatically recognizes when users are operating in an IME-equipped network. It discovers and manages all aspects of facilitating highly secure, high-quality, low-cost call routing via IP networks including the Internet making the experience easy to use for both users and administrators alike.

The technology allows end users to more effectively communicate using body language through video, as well as optimized voice technology, while at the same time helping to reduce costs. Additionally, services from Cisco and its partners can help ensure customers derive the greatest possible return from the technology and experience better collaboration across network boundaries. Cisco said IME builds on its history of providing solutions across its collaboration portfolio that foster business-to-business collaboration, including offerings from Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx.