By Cara Sievers

Tuesday’s Industry Address, from 10 - 10:50 a.m., will feature Joe Burton, CTO of Cisco's unified communications division, speaking on "The Future of Enterprise Networks and Unified Communications." In the keynote, Burton plans to discuss “the current state of the industry, changing user demands, IT requirements, and the challenges that customers and vendors need to work together to address,” he said. “There won’t be a huge ‘buy our product’ push, but I hope it will be thought provoking.”

While Cisco will not be making any specific announcements at the VON show, the company recently announced a number of product developments and strategic partnerships. Cisco is now touting its “telepresence for everyone” with the availability of the CTS 1300 single-screen telepresence unit, targeted at branch offices and medium-sized businesses, along with Extended Reach TelePresence for customers who need an immersive experience but at lower bandwidth or alternate access connections. Cisco also has announced additional UC integration with WebEx and Microsoft Office Communicator, and has debuted the Blackberry MVS Server for Cisco Unified Communications Manager, an enhanced version of BlackBerry MVS optimized for use with Cisco Unified Communications Manager to support enhanced features such as a single “reach me anywhere” corporate phone number with one caller ID and voice mail box and simultaneous or sequential ringing of up to four devices including Blackberries and Cisco IP phones.

According to Burton, more than 100,000 customers (and more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500) have deployed more than 23 million Cisco phones and use Cisco UC to build a competitive advantage. “Cisco is either number one or two in every major UC market category according to annual shipments, including IP telephony, messaging, conferencing and contact center,” said Burton.

“We believe that Unified Communications will continue to be a core element of most leading organizations’ strategies for improving employee productivity and customer relationships around the world,” he continued. “In this economic environment, companies are looking to do more with less and UC provides real, tangible ways to speed decision-making, reduce costs and improve team collaboration (whether within or across enterprise borders). UC solutions continue to deliver lower total costs of ownership than traditional communications infrastructure. Additionally, as we begin to emerge from what’s being called the Great Recession, leading enterprises will look to accelerate product and service innovation to keep a step ahead of the competition and UC technologies provide a foundation for this innovation.”

Burton added that because UC is vital to an overall collaboration strategy that incorporates video and social software solutions, he believes UC will remain a hot topic in the years to come.

“In the next few years, we expect organizations to focus on accelerating innovation as a means to maintain growth, especially if the economic downturn results in a prolonged recovery cycle,” explained Burton. “In this case, the central themes of using UC and collaboration technologies to improve decision making and ideation amongst teams who are geographically dispersed will continue to be highly relevant.”

Burton is CTO in Cisco's Voice Technology Group, where his team is responsible for technical strategy and advanced research for Unified Communications at Cisco. During his career at Cisco, Burton has led the development of many of Cisco's Unified Communications products, including MeetingPlace voice, video and data conferencing products, IPVC video conferencing, IP Communicator, Unified Advantage, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, productivity application integrations, and Cisco Unity Connection integrated voice messaging products. Additionally, Burton led the Cisco-wide Voice Systems Architecture group that coordinates standards development and architecture for all voice products at Cisco. Previously, he was the chief architect for Cisco's messaging products, including the Unity unified messaging system.