As part of today's portfolio announcement at Cisco's Collaboration Summit, the company introduced a ground-breaking version of its industry-leading unified communications platform, featuring innovations and enhancements designed to reduce costs and increase operating efficiencies between and within global enterprises. Cisco® Unified Communications System Release 8.0 enables organizations to collaborate in new ways that remove barriers to communications with partners, suppliers and customers through integrated voice, video, presence, instant messaging and Web sessions.

Cisco Unified Communications System 8.0 includes advanced integrated Internet Protocol (IP) applications that allow businesses to extract more value from their communications through federated presence across devices and platforms, and through instant messaging, customer care, conferencing, video and mobility capabilities. These help enable:

• Rich, highly secure business-to-business communications.
• Innovative and interoperable communications, including enterprise instant messaging, Cisco Unified IP Phones as collaborative endpoints, and advanced mobile solutions.
• Flexible deployment models, including virtualized environments that allow customers to use Cisco Unified Communications solutions in a hybrid deployment on-premises and in the cloud as-a-service.
• Compelling integrated user experiences that incorporate video throughout the solution and that recognize the importance of simple and efficient collaborations with customers.