Hot on the heels of Oracle's launch of its Beehive collaboration tool, leading network vendor Cisco has announced upgrades to its Unified Communications, TelePresence and WebEx systems.

Cisco claimed that the latest releases will enable further penetration of the market for collaboration systems, which it values at £18bn.

"We believe that collaboration will be the next phase of the internet," said Tim Stone, Cisco's head of collaboration solutions for Europe.

"Organisations are being pressed to collaborate across physical boundaries and across boundaries set up to prevent access to Web 2.0 and Facebook-type applications."

Stone explained that Cisco's strategy is concentrated around what it called the Unified Workspace.

"Because of the proliferation of devices, networks and operating systems, people are working more from disparate locations, and they want their business applications delivered out to these areas," he said.

Cisco's Unified Communications product has been upgraded to System Release 7.0, which Cisco said offers "significant improvements in total cost of ownership, ease of use and interoperability with business applications".

Targeting the contact centre is a new addition to Cisco's Expert On Demand telepresence system which allows in-branch customer service staff to summon relevant expertise from within a telepresence session.

The final part of Cisco's push further into the collaboration space is the introduction of WebEx Connect, a new software-as-a-service platform combining WebEx's current collaboration offering with business-focused widgets.

Michael Murphy, senior product manager for Cisco WebEx, said: "This is a new collaborative development platform.

"We are releasing services and capabilities, along with documentation and a full set of APIs, so that customers can build and integrate legacy applications into their collaborative workspace, along with widgets."

Murphy added that the system would be hosted by WebEx in its disparate data centres.

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