Cisco Expects UC Projects to Grow 60% in 2008

US networking equipment vendor Cisco expects sales of its unified communications (UC) solutions to rise by more than 60% in 2008 in the Central and Northern South America and Caribbean areas (Cansac), UC business developer for the region, Gerardo Chávez, told BNamericas.

Sales of UC this year have already grown 60% over 2006 thanks to Cisco's focus on IP telephony and integrated solutions, Chávez said. Cisco's Cansac region includes all of Central America, the Caribbean as well as Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru.

Chávez says one out of every five Cisco engineers is trained in unified communications solutions.

Cisco's UC solution helps companies integrate video, voice and data applications, enabling benefits such as simultaneous web conferencing over notebooks and IP telephones.

The firm has just finished deploying a large unified communications project for the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (Cabei), and Chávez expects the financial services sector to continue being the most common UC clients in the region.

"Just as we predicted in 2001, companies have started spending the same amount of money on IP telephony as they were previously spending on traditional telephones. Now, the majority of a company's systems are based on IP," Chávez said.

UC solutions are attractive to multinational companies because they enable them to share expertise of their professionals in different countries without having to send them there or contract new human resources.

"The organizations of today need to virtualize their experts to accompany their growth. It's difficult to open 50 branches in different countries and fill them all with fifty professionals at once," he said.

Chávez says that the concepts of presence and availability are two of the biggest selling points for UC. However, this year the company has also launched unified communications in a software as a service SaaS format.

Posted to the site on 27th November 2007