Cisco Retools Quad, Callway as WebEx Cloud Services

Cisco is pulling its Cisco Quad and Cisco Callway under the WebEx cloud services brand as WebEx Social and WebEx Telepresence, respectively. The move expands the collaboration services delivered from the WebEx cloud, the world’s second-largest public cloud for business collaboration applications.

WebEx Social enables employees working on mobile devices, email and personal productivity applications to easily engage in social collaboration with their colleagues. It also unifies social and real-time collaboration solutions  like video, voice, IM, presence and web conferencing  into a single, integrated user experience.

Among the new capabilities in Cisco Webex Social are integration with Microsoft Office for group editing and posting of documents, presentations and spreadsheets. It also includes email integration so users can work from their preferred email client to post to WebEx Social. Cisco also has upgraded the iPhone and iPad client so users can transition from social networking to real-time IM, Web conferencing and voice calls directly from their mobile application. Finally, it adds browser-based HD video calling without initiating a separate application.

Also, with this release, customers will have a choice of deployment models. WebEx Social is available as an on-premises offering (WebEx Social Server), partner-hosted (through Logicalis, ACS and Alphawest) or a Cisco-hosted cloud-based solution.

WebEx Social Server is targeted for availability worldwide in July while the cloud-based solution is targeted for availability in North America in July.

Cisco WebEx Telepresence, formerly known as Cisco Callway, is managed by Cisco and sold through Cisco Authorized Partners. Customers can purchase or lease, select multipurpose and personal endpoints and connect those endpoints to a hosted service.

New features include the ability to host a video call with up to nine users on the WebEx Telepresence network, support for high-quality audio and video (up to 1080p HD video resolution), access to a new online portal to manage user subscriptions and contact lists, support Cisco TelePresence MX300 and Cisco TelePresence SX20, and streamlined subscription tiers and a new annual prepay option.