Cisco Systems is preparing to launch its IME server, designed to extend the same sort of video collaboration that is found within a company to partners and customers. A new protocol proposed by Cisco, dubbed ViPR, will help Cisco's IME server work with third-party systems.
- Cisco Systems is looking to bring the advantages of unified communications, which primarily are seen within individual companies, to dealings between businesses. Cisco is rolling out a new appliance and a protocol designed to make it easier for companies to communicate with their business partners,...

Avaya and Polycom are expanding their relationship to include the development and marketing of new voice and video unified communications solutions. The integrated offerings will be based on Avaya's Aura UC platform and Polycom's Open Collaboration Network strategy. The Avaya-Polycom partnership is the latest move in a quickly changing UC landscape as vendors attempt to take on major players like Cisco Systems.
- Avaya and Polycom are expanding their partnership to include integrated video, voice and collaborations offerings, the latest move in a quickly evolving unified communications market. The two companies March 9 announced plans to jointly develop and market a host of new, tightly integrated UC sol...

Cisco Systems is integrating its TelePresence video collaboration technology and its unified communications products to create a health care platform designed to improve patient care in virtual physician visits. The platform, which will launch later in March, will allow more collaboration between doctors and patients, Cisco says.
- Cisco Systems is bringing together its TelePresence video collaboration technology and unified communications products to create a platform to enable better patient care in virtual settings. Cisco announced its HealthPresence platform March 1 at the HIMSS (Healthcare Information and Management S...

Pepsico taps Cisco and BT for a telepresence initiative that will roll out in the companys major offices worldwide. The project will use Ciscos TelePresence technology and BTs services. The move illustrates the growing enterprise demand for telepresence technologies, and the need for interoperability between vendor systems. Cisco and Polycom differ on the ways to establish interoperability standards.
- A decision by Pepsico to deploy Cisco Systems TelePresence solution illustrates the growing demand for the technology, which can help enterprises improve collaboration and reduce expenses. The giant food company announced Feb. 2 that it will use Ciscos solution and services from BT to improve co...

Cisco Systems is releasing a protocol designed to improve interoperability with telepresence systems from other vendors. In addition, Cisco is rolling out applications to expand its TelePresence technology beyond the virtual meeting room and is offering new endpoints that are more energy-efficient and easier to install. The announcements come as VOIP and video conferencing rivals such as Polycom are looking for ways to keep pace with Cisco.
- Cisco Systems is aiming to expand the reach of telepresence capabilities, releasing an interoperability protocol and pushing its own TelePresence product beyond virtual meeting rooms. The networking giant on Jan. 26 also unveiled two new TelePresence endpoints that are designed for easier instal...

Cisco Systems is looking to bring its telepresence capabilities into the home, a strategy Cisco officials will talk about at the Consumer Electronics Show. The move will bring Cisco into competition with Skype, which already offers such capabilities, and Polycom, which is partnering with IBM on a consumer video communications prototype that will be shown at CES.
- Cisco Systems is continuing its push into the home, with a video communications strategy using a consumer high-definition television and a broadband connection. Cisco officials are talking about their plans at the Consumer Electronics Show, which runs Jan. 7 to 10 in Las Vegas. In conjunction w...

Jajah, a small Silicon Valley VOIP company, is being bought by Telefonica Europe for $207 million in an all-cash deal. Jajah's technology is designed to enable consumers and businesses to communicate over the Internet on any device and from any network. The company's voice-over-IP platform has made inroads into social networks, such as Twitter.
- After more than a week of speculation about its future including reports of interest from Cisco Systems and Microsoft VOIP vendor Jajah is being bought by Telefonica Europe. Telefonica, known better by the name O2, announced Dec. 23 that it is buying the smaller Silicon Valley company for $207 m...

With enterprises looking for ways to save money, demand for unified communications and VOIP technologies is expected to grow rapidly. Gartner is predicting the unified communications and collaboration market will reach $7.4 billion by the end of the year, a 22 percent jump over 2008, and that HD-based video meeting solutions will replace 2.1 million airline seats annually by 2012, at a cost of $3.5 billion to the travel and hospitality industry every year. A host of companies, from Microsoft, IBM and Cisco Systems to Siemens Enterprise Communications, Alcatel-Lucent and Avaya, are looking for ways to expand their reach in the field. To help getter a better look at this market, eWEEK spoke to Paul McMillan, director of UC technical vision and strategy at the office of Siemens CTO. McMillan said the key to UC is enhancing the collaborative environment.
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BT and Cisco are partnering to create a cloud-based, hosted unified communications platform designed to make it more cost-effective for businesses to embrace UC technologies, which bring together voice, mobile and data services. The services will be offered through BT, while Cisco Services will build the underlying infrastructure and help sell the services.
- Cisco Systems and British Telecom are creating a cloud-based service to offer businesses hosted unified communications services. The goal of the partnership, announced Dec. 9, is to enable cash-strapped companies in a difficult economy a way to take advantage of the benefits of UC without having ...

Avaya and Cisco Systems were the top vendors in a unified communications market that saw strong growth in the third quarter, according to Dell'Oro Group. However, while the UC space is doing well in the second half of 2009 and is expected to continue growing in 2010, it will be a while before it reaches the pre-recession numbers of 2008.
- Avaya and Cisco Systems were the top vendors in a growing unified communications space in the third quarter, according to research company Dell'Oro Group. In a statement released Dec. 3, Dell'Oro analysts said more than 70 percent of the vendors in the space contributed to the market's growth in...

After years of rumors, Calix Inc. finally filed to go public today.

Here's the filing, which is sure to put CEO Carl Russo back in the spotlight. Besides being one of the funniest, most free-wheeling executives one is likely to meet, he's also famous for having sold start-up Cerent Inc. to Cisco Systems in 1999 for $7 billion. Cerent had already filed for its IPO before Cisco came calling, paying one of the frothiest valuations of the late 1990s.

But while Russo may have been the front-man for Cerent and now for Calix, the founder of both companies was Mike Hatfield (He actually had a few co-founders on Cyan). While less well-known, he's got a sterling record when it comes to knowing where the puck is going in networking. After stints at former high-fliers DSC and AFC during the formative days of the Information Superhighway, he created Cerent in 1997 to build optical networking gear used by phone companies to move massive amounts of voice and data traffic through the "core" of the Internet that connects major cities and regions.

Of course, demand for networking gear of all types crashed just a year later with the Net Bust, as it became clear that far too much capacity had been built. Nonetheless, Hatfield founded Calix just months later to take a crack at what had long been considered the least appealing part of the networking market: the so-called "access" gear that delivers traffic over "the last mile," from the phone companies' central offices located in towns and neighborhoods to each subscriber's home. Traditionally, companies competed hard to make a thin profit on this more commoditized gear. But Hatfield sensed that Calix could attract a lot of attention if its boxes helped phone companies deliver more than just phone service. After all, cable companies were trying to add phone service to their menu of offerings, and Calix' gear would let phone companies add TV and other services to their basic voice plans. According to its IPO filing, the company had $250 million in revenuees in 2008, though it lost $12.9 million on the year (so evidently Calix hasn't been as successful at figuring out how to fatten those margins on access gear.)

So if Cerent was about the "core" and Calix was about the "edge," guess where Cyan is aiming? That's right--at "the middle mile." This is gear that connects the central offices to the core network. While most venture capitalists are still loath to invest in any networking start-ups (Hatfield figures they lost $2 billion on them during the Net Bust), he figures this section will be the next big chokepoint on the Internet. The reason: millions of people are now routinely consuming and sending high-definition video and other weighty digital fare, to a broader range of devices, such as the iPhone. But much of this middle mile still contains huge amounts of old copper lines rather than higher-capacity fiber-optics. Cyan's gear is designed to help carriers make the most of what they have, as they move to networks more capable of handling the load.

More than technology, Hatfield says Cyan is one of a new generation of networking companies with much lower-cost business models. That's critical, because carriers can't afford to just keep buying more of the same pricier gear as Net traffic continues to soar. While it has typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build a cutting-edge networking company in the past, he thinks Cyan will cost a tenth as much. It's not just that consumers are demanding so much more bandwidth, but that they're not willing to pay for it. "Today's bandwidth hogs are the consumers of the future," he says."Consumers aren't going to pay ten times the money for ten times the bandwidth," he says. See a video interview with Hatfield, with the site Light Reading, here.

He says Cyan's costs are so much lower because it relies on open source software and off-the-shelf communications chips--rather than proprietary code and chips (sounds like Arista, which I wrote about in the magazine a few weeks back). Evidently, Cyan is off to a promising start. Hatfield says the company already has more than 20 customers, and more are on the way thanks to the Federal broadband stimulus program.

Cisco has sweetened its acquisition offer for Norway-based videoconferencing company Tandberg by 11%, to $3.4 billion. That should be enough to satisfy the 90%-plus of investors who had withheld their support for the existing deal. The company says more than 40% of Tandberg shareholders, including the largest ones, have "pre-accepted the offer." More details here from Bloomberg.

I'd heard that an increase of 10% to 15% would likely get the deal done, so this improvement seems designed to accomplish two simultaneous goals: to put the acquisition over the top, without sending the message that Cisco will panic and radically pay up when shareholders of acquisition targets hold out for more. That's critical for a company as acquisitive as Cisco, which has done four large deals in just the last 45 days. At Cisco's shareholder meeting on Nov. 12, Cisco CEO John T. Chambers warned that "I'll walk" rather than overpay. "We're not going to pay a price that we don't think is good for shareholders."

One way or another, Chambers needed to get this deal done. He has said that video is his number one strategic priority, and video-conferencing in particular is a great opportunity for Cisco. Few, if any, forms of traffic chew up bandwidth and require more sophisticated routing and switching than videoconferencing--which needs to be not only high-res, but real-time.

And buying Tandberg was clearly the best way to accelerate his grand video plans. The company is not only the market leader in videoconferencing gear, but it's by far the hottest player in the market--not only with the mid-tier conference room systems that are the bulk of the industry, but also for high-end telepresence systems like the ones Cisco sells. Multiple industry sources I've spoken to say Tandberg routinely beats Cisco in deals for these systems, which create the illusion that you're actually sitting in the same room with other attendees, wherever they may be.

Also, Cisco needed to find a way to embrace open standards for its telepresence offerings. Currently, Cisco's systems only work with other Cisco systems, for the most part. That's unacceptable, for a company that built its Internet equipment empire by championing the most important open standard of them all--the Internet Protocol. Analysts say Tandberg is a leader not only in product innovation, but in making its gear inter-operate with other brands.

Here's a video of Chambers and Tandberg CEO Fredrik Halvorsen talking about the deal at the time.

PC peripherals maker Logitech International has done its largest ever acquisition, by purchasing videoconferencing system maker LifeSize Communications for $405 million. This definitely represents an interesting new twist in the videoconferencing space. Given Cisco Systems' $3 billion acquisition of market leader Tandberg a few weeks back (now contested by investors who want a higher price), I would have thought that Polycom or Hewlett-Packard would have gone after LifeSize to fill out their product lines. The Austin-based company, which I've written about a few times, has been one of the faster growers thanks to its less expensive, easy to use gear.

What's most interesting is the potential for Logitech to accelerate the commoditization of videoconferencing. The company specializes in high-volume manufacturing of PC mice, keyboards and other gizmos; it's video business is essentially webcams, which bring in roughly $250 million of the company's $1.9 billion in annual sales, says Logitech president Gerald Quindlen. LifeSize, on the other hand, makes stand-alone gear that lets users launch a HD-quality videoconference with a few keystrokes. Quindlen says Logitech will be able to apply its economies of scale and other cost savings to "make video mainstream." Says LifeSize CEO Craig Malloy, "the opportunity is drive price points to the point that it's a no brainer for every office and conference room in the world."

Evidently, LifeSize wasn't going to pull that off on its own. While rapidly growing, the company is very vertically-integrated for a company its size--with in-house chip designers and other high-priced technology experts. And one source with knowledge of its performance says sales actually dipped slightly in its most recent quarter.

But together, LifeSize should get the resources to make a go of its strategy to bring videoconferencing down maket. Malloy admits he was puzzled when Logitech first came a courtin', as he had talked mostly with Cisco, Polycom and other traditional market players. But Quindlen shared his view that videoconferencing was nearing an inflection point when sales would take off--the way the netbook market did, when the chips, displays and software got cheap enough.

With LifeSize off the market, the pressure on Cisco to complete its Tandberg bid rises a notch. That's because there simply aren't many players of consequential size in the videoconferencing market.

When Cisco Systems casts its net–in wireless infrastructure, general network infrastructure or just about anywhere else in networking–few areas of the market are left untouched.