When Cisco’s Tony Bates delivered a keynote address at the newly minted Enterprise Connect Conference (formerly VoiceCon 2010), he included real-life implementations of the Intercompany Media Exchange (IME). As described in this company issued press release, the IME is key to luring diverse and dispersed companies to communicate through the IP-based cloud and, perhaps more importantly, avail themselves of all the features and functions of integrated into Cisco’s portfolio of collaboration capabilities.

IME has turned into a revenue opportunity for Cisco partner Dimension Data and a showcase for the progressive nature of Australian enterprises. As I described it in this post back in November 2009, the IME is designed to enable a company that has already made the move to Cisco’s Unified Communications infrastructure to auto-discover” other islands of Cisco UC. It can start with a single phone call and expand to cover the full range of end-to-end, broadband communications and collaboration.

The demo during the Bates keynote at Enterprise Connect was initiated by employees of Queensland Rail in Australia and received by folks at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater. After an initial call “discovered” that both were operating versions of the Cisco software that could support broadband video, they were able to use traditional phone numbers to launch a video conference call. Because the call was in a Cisco UC cloud and the IME protocol was employed to “authenticate” the endpoint devices the call could traverse each company’s firewall or session border controller without disruption.

As demonstrated, the video paths were encrypted and secure. The systems at either end were able to determine that the path was secure and, ultimately, deliver the highest level of service that the systems were able to deliver. Through these demonstrations, Cisco shows how IME is bound to become the vehicle for expanding the footprint of its broadband, IP-based cloud beyond traditional corporate boundaries.

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Tags: Cisco, IP telephony, Recombinant Communications