Some people might not think Google Voice and Google Wave are contenders in the business unified communications business. But executives at Cisco Systems are not among them.
Officials at Cisco Systems Inc. say they are closely watching Google Inc.'s aggressive foray onto their unified communications turf and plan to respond quickly by boosting the capabilities of Cisco's offerings.
Cisco's announcement in late June that it plans to offer at least some pieces of its IP voice technology as a hosted service could be viewed as a direct response to Google's recent move to start limited release of its Web-based Google Voice and Google Wave communications tools.
Though Google Voice and Google Wave might be seen primarily as consumer offerings, they could provide value for smaller businesses. And as often is the case in communications, tools that start out in the consumer space frequently wind up adding more features over time, ultimately becoming useful for more business users, and even larger businesses.
Google Wave, which has been in development for about two years, promises to give users a single platform for accessing e-mail, instant messaging, blog, wiki, multimedia management and document-sharing tools.
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