• Cisco Smart Business Communications System (SBCS)
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express — for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs)
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Formally CallManager) — for larger medium-sized business

Cisco’s portfolio of IP phones is the largest selection and is the most deployed brand of IP Phone in the industry. The portfolio includes basic, business, and manager models of phones that can address all telephone needs in locations ranging from the lobby to the executive office. All of the phones communicate with one of the call processing devices listed above to gain access to all provided telephony services. The control protocol for phone to call processing device will be Skinny Client Control Protocol (SCCP), or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). Common to all control protocols is the media protocol Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP).

Cisco IP phones are available in wired and wireless versions and provide handset functionality that rivals that of traditional telephone systems. A list of Cisco Unified IP Phones is available on Cisco’s website.

The mass migration to IP telephony has delivered an initial wave of value to companies large and small. By consolidating voice, video, and data networks onto a single IP network, organizations have reduced the cost of communications, taken advantage of underused network capacity, and laid a foundation for unified communications.

Read Part 1 here

Author: Paul Stryer

Sources
Cisco IP Phones
Cisco Unified Communications Manager

VoIP is a method of taking analog audio signal, like the kind you hear when you talk on the phone, and turning them into digital data that can be transmitted over an Internet Protocol (IP) network, or the internet.

In the networking industry, IP Telephony (IPT) is a term that is used synonymously with the term VoIP. Cisco Systems uses the term IPT to define a portion of their entire suite of VoIP products called Unified Communications. Cisco’s IPT suite of products consists of media control protocols, hardware, and software.

The first step toward learning the potential of this technology is understanding the terminology. As a summary of the explanation above:

• VoIP refers to a way to carry phone calls over an IP data network, whether on the Internet or on an internal network. A primary attraction of VoIP is its ability to help reduce expenses because telephone calls travel over the data network rather than the phone company’s network.
• IP telephony encompasses the full suite of VoIP enabled services including the interconnection of phones for communications; related services such as billing and dialing plans; and basic features such as conferencing, transfer, forward, and hold. These services might previously have been provided by a PBX.
• IP communications includes business applications that enhance communications to enable features such as unified messaging, integrated contact centers, and rich-media conferencing with voice, data, and video.
• Unified communications takes IP communications a step further by using such technologies as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Presence along with Mobility solutions to unify and simplify all forms of communications independent of location, time, or device.

Cisco IP telephony solutions are comprised of two categories: call-processing software and endpoints. Telephones and endpoint devices allow your organization to efficiently run voice, data, and video communications over a single, converged network.

Author: Paul Stryer

Sources
Cisco IP Phones
Cisco Unified Communications Manager