RIM Integrates Mobile Voice Server with Cisco UC

The wires continue to buzz with news from RIM’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium. Of particular interest to Recombinant Telephony fans is a deep integration of RIM’s Mobile Voice Server (MVS) with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (UCM) software. The result, which will be generally available in the third quarter of this year, is a enterprise services platform capable of delivering many of the features of the vaunted Google Voice offering as well as call management software from other enterprise infrastructure providers like Alcatel-Lucent’s Rich Communications Manager and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS2007 R2).

Enterprises that deploy MVS in Cisco environments will support single-number access to as many as four different telephones, including Blackberries and Cisco IP-phones. They can make these phones ring sequentially or simultaneously based on the employees preferences. The other major features involve the ability to treat Blackberries like other IP-phones under the management of the Cisco UCM server. That means they can originate calls from their smartphones or a company line and they can even make a transition form their smartphone to office phone in the middle of a conversation.

RIM developed the solutions as part of the Cisco “Technology Developer Program”. The MVS is largely the fruits of the acquisition of Ascendent Systems in 2007. In an accompanying press release, RIM mentions some other very interesting features, including “Blackberry smartphone authentication”, designed to assure that only authorized users are gaining access to the Cisco network. It benefits from “deeper integration” with the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server, as well as direct SIP-based connection between Cisco Unified Communications Manager and BlackBerry MVS Server. The result is a centralized point of control for setting up and managing features, assigning telephone numbers to Blackberries, and to establish policies for treatment of inbound and outbound calls.

The links between UCM and MVS are the foundation of this offer. Innovation “at the edges” are required to deliver a steadily growing set of features and functions that the increasingly mobile enterprises are coming to expect.



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