Technology Overview of Cisco IP Telephony Solutions

Unified communications can help address the challenge today's organizations face as they contend with increasingly complex environments and increasingly mobile workers using a wide array of communications methods from an array of locations.

Employees, business partners, and customers now conduct business using seemingly infinite combinations of voice, video, data, and mobility network applications. They work in a variety of locations, whether from their desks, in conferences rooms, in airports, warehouses, or vehicles. Without unified communications, however, these applications are often not used as effectively as they could be. The result is information overload and misdirected communications that delay decisions, slow down processes, and reduce productivity.

The Benefits of Cisco Telephony Solutions

As precursors to unified communications, IP telephony and IP communications solutions enabled organizations to streamline business processes and reduce costs. For years, companies have realized the benefits that carrying voice, data, and video communications across a common, IP infrastructure can bring.

From these, unified communications solutions have evolved and offer even greater benefits. Unified communications applications are actually integrated to create a workspace in which communications users can choose how and when to be connected and available. Besides helping organizations integrate their communications more closely with business processes, unified communications ensures that information reaches recipients quickly, through the most appropriate medium, no matter where they may be working or what device they may be using.

Unified communications allows businesses to collaborate in real time using advanced applications from an integrated, easy-to-use interface. These applications include:

• Video conferencing
• Integrated voice and Web conferencing
• Mobile IP soft phones
• Database access and queries
• Customer information
• Voicemail, and more

The Value of Cisco Telephony Solutions

VoIP and IP telephony are becoming increasingly popular with large corporations and consumers alike. For many people, Internet Protocol (IP) is more than just a way to transport data, it's also a tool that simplifies and streamlines a wide range of business applications. Telephony is the most obvious example. VoIP—or voice over IP—is also the foundation for more advanced unified communications applications—including Web and video conferencing—that can transform the way you do business.

Recurrent offers Used Cisco Telephony Solutions which include:

• VoIP which carries phone calls over an IP data network, whether on the Internet or your own internal network. The primary attraction of VoIP is its ability to help reduce expenses because telephone calls travel over the data network rather than the phone company's network.
• IP telephony which encompasses the full suite of VoIP enabled services including the interconnection of phones for communications; related services such as billing and dialing plans; and basic features such as conferencing, transfer, forward, and hold. These services might previously have been provided by a PBX.
• IP communications which include business applications that enhance communications to enable features such as unified messaging, integrated contact centers, and rich-media conferencing with voice, data, and video.
• Unified communications taking IP communications a step further by using such technologies as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and presence along with mobility solutions to unify and simply all forms of communications, independent of location, time, or device.