Telecom Geneva Stand #6100, Hall 6, Telecom Village
GENEVA + San Jose, October 15, 2003 - Cisco Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CSCO), today announced that service providers deploying the Cisco® Service Provider Business Voice Solution can drive toward increased customer retention and return on investment (ROI) by offering innovative managed business voice services based on Cisco Internet Protocol (IP) Communications (IPC).
With the Cisco Service Provider Business Voice Solution, service providers can offer a portfolio of revenue-generating managed voice services including business phone services, site-to-site virtual private networks (VPNs), unified communications, public switched telephone network (PSTN) connectivity and remote network operations, all over a common, scalable and reliable voice-over-IP (VoIP) infrastructure. These services help service providers increase profitability by providing opportunities for new service revenue over converged voice and data IP networks.
End-user customers who choose to out-task the management of their advanced voice technology applications can use service providers' resilient networks and extensive experience in deploying voice services. These customers benefit from more predictable per-user costs and increased employee productivity by using new IP-enabled communications applications such as unified messaging, notification services, network-based call distribution and find-me/follow-me features. Additional reductions in capital and operating expenses result from savings on intersite voice traffic and from calls to the PSTN.
China Unicom SiChuan, the second-largest telecom operator in China, is using the Cisco Service Provider Business Voice Solution to create an end-to-end IP telephony service for its customers. The service can provide China Unicom customers with innovative IP Private Branch Exchange (PBX) features and enhanced applications such as unified communications, extension mobility and integration with corporate directory services. "Using China Unicom's single network for voice, data and internet services will significantly reduced internal resources that our customers required to maintain those services," said Tong Xiao-Yu, China Unicom SiChuan General Manager.
China Unicom SiChuan is just one of the many service providers taking advantage of a Cisco equipment-based packet-voice transit network to lower voice transit infrastructure costs and to also drive new innovative, revenue-generating business voice services revenue.
Latin School of Chicago needed additional network-security and user-management features that it was not able to get from its existing Centrex network. The SBC family of companies, one of the world's leading data, voice and Internet service providers, deployed its SBC PremierSERVSM IP Telephony Advantage solution, based on the Cisco Service Provider Business Voice solution, to provide managed services based on Cisco Personal Assistant, Cisco CallManager and Cisco UnityTM voicemail.
"Our managed services have helped make it possible for the Latin School of Chicago to substantially cut capital expenditures, reduce operational overhead and simplify technology while improving the organization's ability to communicate with students, faculty and the public at large," said Chuck Rudnick, senior vice president of business marketing for SBC Communications Inc.
British Telecommunications (BT), the leading UK provider of voice, data and Internet services to the financial-services community, is also a business voice services provider. Using the Cisco Service Provider Business Voice Solution, BT is currently offering a full suite of services that include managed Cisco CallManager, intra-enterprise voice VPNs, traditional PBX interworking with IP telephony and centralized PSTN breakout. The flexibility of BT's services enables major customers such as Abbey, seeking to retain traditional PBXs at some sites and convert to Cisco IP phones at other sites, to still exploit the cost savings and productivity gains of converged voice and data networking, while preserving its existing private-dialing plans and maintaining feature transparency across these mixed deployments.
"BT's Multimedia VoIP and VoIP port services allow us to stay focused on our core business of U.K. personal financial services, and benefit from an easy migration to IP telephony by outsourcing the operation to BT," said Bill Gibbons, director, Technology Services and Support at Abbey. "This allows us to evolve our network at a comfortable pace. With one quick call to BT, we can turn up services and satisfy demand almost instantly."
The products included in the Cisco Service Provider Business Voice solution are Cisco CallManager, Cisco CallManager Express, Cisco Unity Unified Messaging, Cisco IP phones and Cisco IOS® Software-based customer-edge gateways. Also included are Cisco VoIP core network solutions such as the Cisco BTS 10200 and PGW 2200 Softswitch platforms and the AS5000 and MGX8000 Series voice gateways.
To learn more about Cisco Business Voice solutions go to: www.cisco.com/go/businessvoice.
