Cisco Announces Unified Communications Platforms for Small and Mid-sized Businesses and New Sales Productivity Initiatives

NEW ORLEANS – Cisco Partner Summit – March 2, 2011 – Cisco today announced two new purpose-built unified communications solutions for small and mid-sized businesses. These new Cisco® Unified Communications offerings provide customers in these distinct market segments with complete, affordable, business-class collaboration systems to help drive productivity and profitability.

Cisco also announced a new global sales productivity initiative called Cisco Partner Advisor, with agents available to give Select and Registered partners immediate and personalized sales support to accelerate sales and make it easier to do business with Cisco. In addition, Cisco is providing channel partners with more ways to offer complete collaboration solutions for small and mid-sized customers by extending Cisco WebEx® Meeting Center to its partners.

Announcement Highlights

• New Unified Communications System for Small Business – The Cisco Unified Communications 300 Series is a complete collaboration system delivering everything a company with two to 24 users needs for business-class networking and voice communications. This easy-to-use, affordable solution lets a small business take advantage of IP telephony to reduce phone costs, boost employee productivity, and create a more collaborative company. It includes built-in data and wireless support, along with features such as voicemail and automated attendant. Three-year, zero percent financing is available from Cisco Capital® in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom for the Cisco UC300 Series through the end of July, 2011.
• New Unified Communications System for Mid-Sized Businesses - The Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 3000 is an economical unified communications platform designed for growing mid-sized businesses, and supports a capacity of 300 users across 10 sites. The system is quick for a trained Cisco partner to set up, and easy-to-use, with an intuitive user interface, helping these customers to save time and money, and helping our channel partners to optimize their implementation, support, and maintenance practices.
  The Cisco Unified CM Business Edition 3000 offers essential features like voice mail, conferencing, the ability to park or hold calls, auto attendant, and standard mobility features like single number reach, extension mobility, and tele-worker support to connect business calls and voice mail messages to employees anywhere they choose to work. The Cisco Unified SIP Phone 3905 is an affordable, IP-based phone that integrates with the Cisco Unified CM Business Edition 3000 to address the need for uncomplicated voice communications for mid-sized businesses. It included fixed keys for redial, transfer, hold and resume, speakerphone, volume toggle, and a PC switch port to reduce cabling installation requirements.
• New Partner Sales Support Initiative – Cisco Partner Advisor is an innovative sales coverage and support initiative for Cisco small business and mid-market partners that provides immediate, personalized sales support via click-to-chat or phone. Initially delivered through two global centers in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Lisbon, Portugal, Cisco support personnel are waiting to help new partners get started with Cisco and provide assistance to partners for deal support, programs and tools. Over the next few months, Partner Advisor will continue to roll out in Europe, Emerging Markets, Asia Pacific and Canada, and support will be available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Korean. With this sophisticated sales support offering, Cisco is investing in people and technology to provide sales coverage for more than 24,000 Cisco Select and Registered partners selling to small and mid-market customers around the world.
• Partner Offering for Cisco WebEx - Cisco is introducing a partner-led model for Cisco WebEx Meeting Center designed specifically for partners that sell to small businesses. Cisco WebEx Meeting Center lets end users share applications, presentations, documents, or a PC desktop in real time and work with teams around the world without the time and expense of travel. By selling Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, partners can offer more complete collaboration solutions while helping customers use web conferencing to accelerate productivity and drive business growth. Partners can learn more about selling WebEx Meeting Center at www.cisco.com/go/sbwebex.

Supporting Quotes

• Matthew Hurley, senior vice president, small business market, Bell; a Canadian service provider partner:

"Bell is demonstrating our continued commitment to providing cost-effective communication solutions to small and medium businesses. The Cisco UC320W, designed for small businesses, has all of the features and functionality a customer needs, it is simple to set-up and use, affordable, and built for growing businesses."

• Reza Khorramian, vice president of sales, Business Communications Solutions; a Cisco certified small business and advanced unified communications partner:

"After a brief introduction and training on the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 3000, we installed it with a live network connection to the public telephone network. Setup was very straightforward and simple, especially compared with other PBX systems we have installed. There were no issues getting the system installed and adding and changing users and features. Installation did not require in-depth network training and we were able to get the system successfully making calls in less than an hour."

• Mark Wang, manager, Easier Way, an information system architecture designer and Cisco Unified Communications customer:

"Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 3000 is a very easy-to-use IP communications system for handling all our essential collaboration needs. The management interface in the optional Chinese language is very simple and uncomplicated, which allowed the system to be set up very quickly. We were pleased that our business experienced minimal disruption during the switch over."

• Barry O'Sullivan, senior vice president , Voice Technology Group, Cisco:

"Building on our industry-leadership in the enterprise collaboration market, Cisco is delivering innovative, unified communications solutions that are tailor-made for the unique characteristics of small and mid-market business partners and the customers they serve."

• Ian Pennell, senior vice president, Small Business Technology Group and co-chair, Small Business Council, Cisco:

"Cisco continues to be 100 percent committed to giving our partners and the customers they serve the easy-to-use technology innovation they need to succeed. Our partners and customers have told us they want simple unified communications solutions to help them stay ahead of their competition. Cisco is ready to meet that need."

• Andrew Sage, vice president of worldwide Small Business Sales, Cisco:

"Our partners are the center of our business at Cisco, and we will do whatever we can to help them succeed. Our new Cisco Partner Advisor initiative uses both people and technology to help our small and mid-market business partners to begin or continue working with Cisco to get the immediate sales and programs help they need."