IP Telephony Products

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IP Telephony provides a way for you to extend highly secure, reliable, and consistent communications services to all your employees whether they are in main campus locations, at branch offices, working remotely, or are mobile. IP telephony transmits voice communications over the network using open-standards-based Internet Protocol.

Cisco Unified Communications Express

Cisco IP telephony solutions are an integral part of Cisco Unified Communications, which unify voice, video, data, and mobile applications on fixed and mobile networks enabling users to easily communicate in any workspace using any media, device, or operating system. Using the network as the platform, Cisco IP telephony solutions help organizations of all sizes realize greater security, resilience, and scalability in addition to the inherent benefits of using a converged network for transport and interconnection. You can use Cisco IP telephony solutions to:

• Provide highly secure, reliable, scalable communications that take advantage of your LAN and WAN.
• Improve employee agility and productivity through integration with innovative Cisco Unified Communications and third-party applications.

Cisco IP telephony solutions comprise two categories:

• Call processing
• IP phones
• Wired
• Wireless
• Softphones

Cisco Unified Communications call processing solutions range from Cisco Smart Business Communications System (SBCS) to Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprise branch applications, to Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition and Cisco Unified Communications Manager for larger medium-sized business and enterprise applications. These call processing systems provide voice, video, mobility and presence services to IP phones, media processing devices, VoIP gateways, mobile devices, and multimedia applications.

Cisco IP phones are available in wired and wireless versions and provide handset functionality for Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express, SBCS, and XML applications. Softphones such as Cisco IP Communicator and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator are also available to extend voice and multimedia functionality to clients which run on Windows or Macintosh computers.

Cisco IP telephony products support a wide range of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based capabilities including:

• Support for presence-based applications
• Support for Cisco IP phones with enhanced SIP feature support
• Support for third-party SIP-based phones
• SIP trunking
• Session Border Control
• Simplified administration and maintenance

This network provides a foundation optimized for wireline and wireless IP communications, and includes the ability to support Cisco Unified Border Element, a robust and scalable Session Border Controller (SBC) for easy and cost-effective interconnectivity between independent voice-over-IP networks and analog phone gateways using your existing phone equipment.

Cisco Unified Communications Express

Cisco Unified CME is a feature-rich entry-level IP telephony solution that is integrated directly into Cisco IOS software. Cisco Unified CME allows small business customers and autonomous small enterprise branch offices to deploy voice, data, and IP telephony on a single platform for small offices, thereby streamlining operations and lowering network costs.

Cisco Unified CME is ideal for customers who have data connectivity requirements and also have a need for a telephony solution in the same office, in result allows customers to optimize their operations and maintenance costs, resulting in a very cost-effective solution that meets office needs. CME supports up to 240 phones i.e. for small sites, and is dependent on Cisco IOS platform.

Cisco Unified Communication Manager

CME Features

Because CME runs on a Cisco router, it has the unique advantage of acting as an all-in one device for controlling Cisco IP Phones and trunking to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) through various connections. The following are the key features supported by CME:

• Call processing and device control: As mentioned previously, CME acts as the all in-one call control device. It handles the signaling to the endpoints, call routing, call termination, and call features.
• Command-line or GUI-based configuration: Because Cisco integrated CME directly into the IOS; you have the full flexibility of command-line configuration. You can also use a GUI utility, such as the Cisco Configuration Professional (CCP), to interface with a point-and-click style of configuration.
• Local directory service: The CME router can house a local database of users you can use for authentication in the IP Telephony (IPT) network.
• Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) support: CTI allows the IPT network to integrate with the applications running on the data network. For example, you could use the Cisco Unified Call Connector to make calls directly from your Microsoft Outlook contact list.
• Trunking to other VoIP systems: Although CME can run as a standalone deployment interfacing directly with the PSTN, it can also integrate with other VoIP deployments. For example, you could use CME for a small, 40-user office and have it connect directly over your data network to the corporate headquarters supported by a full Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) cluster of servers.
• Direct integration with Cisco Unity Express (CUE): CUE, which runs through a module installed in a Cisco router, can provide voicemail services to the IP Phones supported by CME.

Cisco Unified Communication Manager

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (formerly Cisco Unified Call Manager) serves as the software-based call-processing component of the Cisco Unified Communications family of products. The Call Manager system extends enterprise telephony features and functions to packet telephony network devices such as IP phones, media processing devices, voice-over-IP (VoIP) gateways, and multimedia applications. Additional data, voice, and video services, such as unified messaging, multimedia conferencing, collaborative contact centres, and interactive multimedia response systems, interact through Cisco Unified Communications Manager open telephony application programming interface (API). Cisco Unified Communications Manager provides signaling and call control services to Cisco integrated telephony applications as well as third-party applications.

Cisco Unified Communication Manager

CUCM Features

CCM provides these features:

• Call processing: Call processing refers to the complete process of originating, routing, and terminating calls, including any billing and statistical collection processes.
• Signaling and device control: CUCM terminates and coordinates all signaling events between call endpoints and directs devices such as phones, gateways, and conference bridges to establish and tear down streaming RTP media connections. Signaling is also referred to as call control and call setup/call teardown.
• Dial plan administration: The dial plan is a set of configurable patterns that CUCM uses to perform call routing. CUCM is responsible for digit analysis (DA) of all calls into or out of the CUCM cluster.
• -Phone feature administration: CUCM extends supplementary services such as hold, transfer, forward, conference, speed dial, redial, and call park to IP phones and gateways.
• Directory services: CUCM uses a portion of the Informix Database Server (IDS) Lightweight Directory Access Protocol version 3 (LDAPv3) database to store user information. Directory synchronization allows centralized user management. Directory synchronization allows CUCM to leverage users already configured in a corporate-wide directory service, such as Microsoft Active Directory 2003 and 2008, Microsoft Active Directory Application Mode (ADAM) 2003, Microsoft Lightweight Directory Services 2008, iPlanet Directory Server 5.1, Sun ONE 5.2 and 6.X, and Open LDAP 2.3.39 and 2.4 directory integrations.
• Backup and restore tools: CUCM provides a Disaster Recovery System (DRS) to back up and restore the CUCM configuration database. The DRS also backs up call detail records (CDR), call management records (CMR), and the CDR Analysis and Reporting (CAR) database.

Cisco Unity Connection

Cisco Unity Connection is a feature-rich voice messaging platform that runs on the same Linux-based Cisco Unified Communications Operating System that is used by Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Connection scales to support enterprise organizations with up to 50,000 users. For organizations with up to 500 users, Connection is available in Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition (CMBE), a single-server solution that includes a co-resident Cisco Unified Communications Manager, which further simplifies installation, support, and maintenance.

Cisco Unity Connection

CUC Features

The following are some of the notable features of Cisco Unity Connection:

• Proven appliance-based platform: Cisco Unity Connection is built on top of the same stable, hardened, appliance-based operating system as CUCM. (These two software products even use the same installation DVD.)
• Up to 20,000 mailboxes per server: Cisco Unity Connection scales to a massive size per server. Even though Unity Connection supports a single-server configuration, most organizations will opt for a high availability pair of servers.
• Access voicemails from anywhere: Carrying on the original dream of Cisco Unity, Cisco Unity Connection allows voicemail retrieval from phone, e-mail, web browser, mobile devices, and instant-messenger platforms.
• LDAP directory server integration: Similar to CUCM, Cisco Unity Connection can integrate with an existing corporate directory (such as Microsoft Active Directory) to avoid creating a duplicate user database.
• Microsoft Exchange support: Cisco Unity Connection can integrate with an existing Microsoft Exchange deployment to enable fantastic features, such as different call treatment based on your Exchange calendar, e-mail text-to-speech (hear your emails read to you from a phone), manage Exchange calendar (accept, decline, cancel, and so on) from a phone, and so on.
• Voice Profile for Internet Mail (VPIM) support: VPIM is a standard allowing voicemail servers to integrate together to exchanging voicemails (and other messaging).
• Active/active high availability: Cisco Unity Connection uses a Publisher/Subscriber IBM Informix database scheme just like CUCM between a pair of servers. The pair of servers can support up to 20,000 mailboxes in a redundant fashion. Both servers can accept client requests (giving it the active/active redundancy). Typically, the largest Cisco Unity Connection server can support up to 250 voicemail ports (essentially allowing 250 people to check their voicemail at a time). By creating a high availability pair, you can now support 500 voicemail ports.

Cisco Unified Presence Server

Cisco Unified Presence promotes an awareness of the VoIP and data networks. Many folks commonly use Instant Messenger (IM) clients to communicate. In these applications, you are able to see the status of a user, gauging whether they are available, busy, or offline before you begin to chat with them. Cisco Unified Presence stretches this capability to the voice network, allowing you to see the status of a user (are they on the phone, off the phone, not available, and so on) before you pick up the phone to dial. In addition to this core functionality, Cisco Unified Presence adds the following capabilities to your voice network:

CUPS Features

• Enterprise instant messaging: Unified Presence incorporates the Jabber Extensible Communication Platform (XCP), which is an industry standard method of communicating between different IM clients.
• Message compliance: Many industries require strict compliance guidelines on instant messenger communication. Cisco Presence supports logging functionality for all types of IM communication (even conversations encrypted with Transport Layer Security [TLS]).
• Interdomain federation: Unfortunately, this feature has nothing to do with Star Trek; however, it has everything to do with connectivity. Using Interdomain federation connections from Unified Presence, you can connect your organization to other domains, such as Google Talk or WebEx Connect, thus giving you worldwide reach.
• Jabber XCP extensibility: XCP allows you to extend Unified Presence into virtually any area of the data or voice network. XCP can allow features such as peer-topeer file sharing, application sharing, video-conference systems, and so on. XCP integrates with nearly any infrastructure, such as directory services, databases, and web portals.
• Secure messaging: Applications integrating into Unified Presence can use IPsec or TLS standards to encrypt and secure all communication

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

Cisco Unified CCX provides a reliable and flexible voice processing and contact center solution for the enterprise Cisco Unified CCX is a packaged solution built upon a Cisco software platform called Customer Response Solutions (CRS). Unified CCX is an IP-based Automated Call Distribution (ACD) system that queues and distributes incoming calls to Unified CCX agents, who can be groups of Unified CM users for Unified CM integration.

You can use Unified CCX applications to route calls to specific agents. You can also integrate Unified CCX with Unified IP IVR to gather caller data and classify incoming calls. Unified CCX includes a web-based real-time and historical reporting system that you can use to monitor system, Contact Service Queue (CSQ), and resource performance.

The Unified CCX system consists of the following major components:

• Resource Manager: Application program that monitors Unified CCX agent phones and allows you to organize agents into resource groups or skills-based partitions according to the types of calls each group can handle.
• CSQ: Application program that places incoming calls in a queue and distributes them to the appropriate set of agents as the agents become available.
• Unified CCX Agent Desktop: Application program that Unified CCX agents run on their desktop computers to log in to the system, change Unified CCX state, and monitor status.

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express

UCCX Features:

• Sophisticated call routing and comprehensive contact management capabilities.
• Automatic call distributor features, including conditional routing, call-in-queue, and expected-wait-time messages.
• Presence integration to help increase caller satisfaction through improved agent performance and expertise.
• Workforce optimization, including workforce management and advanced quality management.
• A mobile skill manager feature that helps enables skill management on the go.

Cisco Unity Express

CME is a fantastic, all-in-one call processing device, provided someone is there to answer the phone. However, just like the full-blown CUCM, there are no built-in voicemail capabilities. All that changes when CUE steps onto the stage. CUE is a voicemail system that you can install into your CME router in one of two form factors: Internal Services Module (ISM) or Service Module (SM). The ISM form factor installs internal to the CUE router and uses solely flash memory for storage. The full SM form factor installs externally to the router and uses a hard disk for storage.

Cisco Unity Express

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