As an avid Cisco follower and yet another company I have a love-hate relationship with, I am rather excited about their latest SMB product. In Cisco terms this would be called a ‘mid-market’ product.
Finally after the mass cull of SMB products they’ve had – most of which were getting to a good level of maturity, they have listened to those of us who listen to our customers. Especially here in the UK…
One of our great strengths here at Unleashed is looking for big-business technologies that are in the reach of small and medium sized businesses. Cisco seem to have delivered with the Business Edition 6000S (BE600S or BE6KS) just this type of product.
These systems replace quite nicely the Cisco UC500 systems of a few years ago. They also go much further in terms of feature set and ease of use.
We’ve been selling the Cisco BE6000 for some time, this is exactly the same software and technology that Cisco use for multinational corporations – available for medium sized businesses. It is a great product that can handle many different aspects of collaboration and enabling smarter working as I covered in my previous blog.
Finally sub-100 user companies can now benefit from the same technology that we were supplying to their larger competitors.
The great thing too – is the BE6000S isn’t cut down as you may think. Essentially the hardware allows a single box solution to tackle many of the needs of smaller businesses, which is actually more of an advantage. Direct connections to ISDN, standard analogue lines are available from the box as well as computing hardware to run the Cisco Collaboration Applications.
Cisco have sized the computing hardware to meet the needs of the smaller sized business. Reducing the cost and putting it in the reach of these organisations. This means that at present it can’t handle all the applications of its bigger brother, things such as Call Centre applications are missing – however everything else is included:
- Cisco Unified Call Manager – the core phone system
- Cisco Unity Connection – Cisco’s voicemail solution
- Cisco Instant Messaging and Presence – this runs Cisco’s Jabber solution for remote working and instant messaging
- Paging – to allow blast messages to be sent to your staff
- Cisco Prime Configuration Professional – a tool to deploy your phones quickly and easily
The best thing that a smaller company will benefit from is flexible working, allowing the Jabber client to be used on tablets, smart phones and PC’s and enabling your workforce to be contactable anywhere.
It’s rare for a smaller company solution that’s cascaded down from enterprise technology to not have its feature set dramatically reduced.
We really feel this is an exciting solution for our clients to benefit from and drive their business forward.
Oh, and when your business grows you can upgrade the hardware that the Cisco applications sit on and benefit from expanded hardware allowing more applications.
If you’d like to speak to myself to see how smarter working will change the way you do business – for the better. Then feel free to give us a call.
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