IP telephony provides a way for you to extend consistent communications services to all your employees in their workspaces, whether they are in main campus locations, at branch offices, working remotely, or are mobile. IP telephony transmits voice communications over the network using open-standards-based Internet Protocol.

Cisco IP telephony solutions are an integral part of Cisco Unified Communications, which unify voice, video, data, and mobile applications on fixed and mobile networks enabling users to easily communicate in any workspace using any media, device, or operating system. Using the network as the platform, Cisco IP telephony solutions help organizations of all sizes realize greater security, resilience, and scalability in addition to the inherent benefits of using a converged network for transport and interconnection. Use Cisco IP telephony solutions to:

• Provide secure, reliable, scalable communications that take advantage of your LAN and WAN
• Improve employee agility and productivity through integration with innovative Cisco Unified Communications and third-party applications.

Cisco IP telephony solutions comprise two categories:

• Call processing
• IP phones - Wired, Wireless, Sofphones

Cisco Unified Communications call processing solutions range from Cisco Smart Business Communications System (SBCS) to Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprise branch applications, to Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition and Cisco Unified Communications Manager for larger medium-sized business and enterprise applications. These call processing systems provide voice, video, mobility and presence services to IP phones, media processing devices, VoIP gateways, mobile devices, and multimedia applications.

Cisco IP phones are available in wired and wireless versions and provide handset functionality for Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition, Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express, SBCS, and XML applications. Softphones such as Cisco IP Communicator and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator are also available to extend voice and multimedia functionality to clients which run on Windows or Mac computers.

Cisco IP telephony products support a wide range of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based capabilities including:

• Support for presence-based applications
• Support for Cisco IP phones with enhanced SIP feature support
• Support for third- party SIP-based phones
• SIP trunking
• Session Border Control
• Simplified administration and maintenance, including introduction of an appliance model implementation for Cisco Unified Communications Manager

This network provides a foundation optimized for wireline and wireless IP communications, and includes the ability to support Cisco Unified Border Element, a robust and scalable Session Border Controller (SBC) for easy and cost-effective interconnectivity between independent voice-over-IP (VoIP) networks and analog phone gateways using your existing phone equipment.