Citrix, Cisco Collaborate on VoIP
March 9th, 2006 - Posted in VoIPCisco made waves earlier in the week with an expansive VoIP product rollout not just aimed at driving up deployments, but also at delivering many of the advanced features hinted at for years, namely unified messaging and enhanced collaboration.
Citrix, better known for its application delivery platform, is working with Cisco to bring much of that functionality to business software suites. Citrix group vice president and general manager, Murli Thirumale, says that for its part, the company is setting out to make voice communications a seamless, if not integral, part of enterprise applications.
The industry has made strides in the structural components of converged networks, explains Thirumale, but by and large, that convergence hasn’t spilled over onto enterprise apps. Voice and data rarely crosses paths in ways that enhance productivity.
Thirumale provides an example of what the company’s efforts, in collaboration with Cisco, can mean for businesses in the near future.
For instance, as a worker using Salesforce.com, “if you open up a contact and hover on a phone number, with Citrix voice enabled, it will allow you to click and place a call.”
To make such click-to-call scenarios a staple in office environments, the companies will be working on seamless interoperability between Citrix’s Application Gateway and Voice Office offerings with Cisco’s Unified CallManger and Unified Presence Server. Once that support is in place, organizations will be one step closer to VoIP-ify their enterprise apps.
Even with the network pieces in place, and broad application support made possible by the Citrix application delivery platform, the main objective is integrating advanced voice features in an intuitive a way as possible while driving up utility. “Clearly people want to deploy it in a way that benefits their users,” says Thirumale.
Add presence awareness – the ability to determine a contact’s status as well as automatically manage and route calls – and a Cisco/Citrix VoIP environment can potentially “expedite business process” and break down many of the inefficiencies inherent in separate voice and data platforms.
After having demonstrated the technology at VoiceCon on Monday, the companies are targeting the second half of 2006 to launch the first batch of products under the partnership.