Cisco, BT Expand IP-Telephony Apps in the Cloud

As we progress into the second decade of the new millennium, we expect to see more partnerships that resemble BT’s agreement with Cisco to embed the resources that support rich phone apps into the telephony cloud. As noted here BT is “engaged closely with Cisco Services to build the underlying virtualised infrastructure for service delivery.” The advantage of this cloud based approach is to enable multi-site, multi-vendor companies to assemble new solutions on an as-needed, utility basis.

“Unified Communications” (UC) figures prominently in this service offering. BT brands its offering the “OneVoice UCC portfolio” and Cisco calls it the virtualization of its Unified Communications Manager infrastructure. But that is just the beginning. Nonetheless, what we are witnessing these days on an enterprise-by-enterprise level is less about unification of communications and more about assembling or re-assembling solutions that serve specific needs – within enterprises, among multiple enterprises and between enterprises and their customers.

The business details of the agreement were not made public, but the two companies have worked together since 2000. This week’s announcement represents an effort to expand from a base of current users in the UK initially into the U.S. and Europe today, the Middle East and Africa next year, followed by Asian-Pacific countries.