Cisco finally goes Mobile.

This news is atleast a week old; Cisco has got upgrades which will enable users to avail of Cisco’s Unified Communication solutions on their mobile phones.

This was always on the cards when Cisco bought Orative ( used to develop software that extends many of the capabilities and features of IP PBXs, including presence awareness, to enterprise users’ cell phones.). The question always was how quickly could Cisco integrate this Orative Solution with their UC suite. Answer : Pretty fast!!!

The software upgrade would enable the mobile users to access all the Unified Communications features, including directory services. It will also enable presence information. I had pointed out in my earlier post that

It brings Business logic to your mobile phone in addition to the conventional PBX-Cellular integration. Now from what I understand on Iotum, isn’t this similar? I could be wrong and I hope that Alec Saunders(CEO,Iotum) can correct me if I am.

Alec did comment on that saying

”We’re targeting the individual mobile professional rather than the call center market. Some similar capabilities, but different use cases.”

Unified Communications is much more than just for call center market. Yes ,as of today it mostly targets the enterprises. Yes, mobile operators are not going to remove their existing MSCs and replace them with IP as a backbone (think IMS) tomorrow. But it will be done soon and Cisco will be a big player. The UC solution suite is a great platform for Value added Services (VAS) even in the current world and open interfaces like TAPI and JTAPI (which Cisco exposes) will enable easier application development ( again think IMS).

There are some other cool features as well in the new software.

Includes new features designed especially for mobile phones, such as automatically dialing into scheduled conference calls and automatically turning the cell phone’s ringer off when the owner’s calendar says he is in a meeting..

Looks like relevance to me. It is going to be interesting to see what is going to be Microsoft-Nortel’s response to this. Even more interesting would be Avaya’s response. Mind you, Avaya has similar mobile capability as well thanks to their acquisition of Traverse Networks late last year.