Cisco Systems is working with Verizon Business to offer small and medium sized businesses a cloud-based way to implement its suite of collaboration services. It is branded as the Verizon Collaboration Center and, rather than describing every feature and function, the two companies are using this Web site to promote a 30 day trial (along with the chance to win a Flip camera (another Cisco property).

The suite includes Web conferencing (powered by WebEx) integrated with a variety of network-based applications and functions, including shared contacts, calendar entries, documents, project plans, business applications and outbound alerts. All are under the control of a browser-based “dashboard” or portal that can run on PCs – via Internet Explorer (Versions 6 or 7) or Firefox 3 – or Mac’s running Firefox 3.

After the 30 day trial, the service is priced on a sliding scale from $24.99 for 5 users up to 225.95 for 50 users. Putting any price on this sort of service is always a challenge, given that industrious small businesspeople can find “free” versions of each of these features or functions. In addition the applications are definitely designed for intra-company deployments when the most visible developments in the collaboration domain extend beyond the enterprise firewalls to support inter-company communications and, perhaps more importantly business-to-customer interactions.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cisco, Verizon business, hosted services, Recombinant Communications