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Cisco gets smart with small business

Cisco launches unified communications appliance for very small companies.

By Rene Millman, 3 Apr 2007 at 18:06

Cisco has launched its unified communications product aimed at very small firms. Details of the suite of products were unveiled at its Worldwide Partner Summit in Las Vegas.

The Smart Business Communications Systems is targeted at firms and organisations employing less than 50 staff. At the core of the offering is the UC500, a small appliance that sits behind a broadband router or modem and features the functionality of the company's CallManager Express.

According to Ian Waters, European marketing manager of Cisco's Unified Communications division, The UC500 version just announced is for 8 to 16 users and provides all the communication needs for a small business that were previously only available to companies with at least 30 employees.

The UC500 suite comprises of an eight port power-over-Ethernet switch with a wireless access point, a firewall and VPN tunnelling termination as well as voice and video conferencing. A version for 32 and 48 users will be available later this year.

Waters said it was important to make these functions available to the lower end of the market. He said the sector is very important to Cisco as it sees this sector as being a $10bn market opportunity by 2009. "That's why we are interested and why our partners should be interested too," he said.

"It is important that we get it as simple as possible both for deployment and pricing. All the licences are including with the box, you get the lot and choose the handset to suit your needs," he said.

He said the deployment of the appliance is plug and play. "While it boots up it autodetects the phones and two minutes later you are ready to make phone calls."

He said the package included an IP phone for home workers that provided an endpoint for a VPN tunnel that connects back to the UC500. As well as this are features such as Unity Express integrated messaging and Call Connector (a toolbar for IE and Outlook).

Waters said the guide price for the solution is $500 (£253) per seat.

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