Cisco sells its six-millionth IP phone

Cisco Systems Inc. has reached a major milestone in the IP communications market with the sale of its six-millionth Internet Protocol (IP) phone worldwide.

Australia’s Westpac Bank has taken possession of the six-millionth Cisco IP phone.

Westpac, which has deployed more than 3000 Cisco 7970G color phones to date, joins a long list of major global customers – including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Boeing, and Ford Motor Co. – which have reduced operational expenses and improved productivity by adopting Cisco IP communications.

In the Philippines, companies like ABS-CBN, Insular Savings Bank, Davao Light and Power Corp., Pag-IBIG Home Development Mutual Fund, and IBM Philippines have acquired Cisco IP phones.

Luichi Robles, country manager of Cisco Systems Philippines, said, "The pace of IP communications adoption is relentless. It took Cisco three years to sell its first million IP phones worldwide but only four months to sell the sixth-million. Businesses are abandoning the inefficient private branch exchange (PBX)-based telephony and are adopting feature-rich IP communications to reduce operational costs and enable productivity-enhancing applications. It’s now much more than just dial tone and phone calls."

IP communications enable voice to be transmitted over the same IP network as video and data. This convergence enables significant reductions in network operational costs and more streamlined network management.

IP communications also help organizations cost-effectively deploy applications such as videoconferencing, collaboration, directory integration, and contact centers with support for open protocols such as Extensible Markup Language (XML).

"The deployment of IP telephony has been driven by the globalization of companies and their need to expand communications along with their growth. IP telephony is changing the way companies communicate as it introduces new innovations not seen or experienced in PBXs during the last 10 years. It is already leading to strong benefits for corporations in various industries," Robles said. "Productivity is the name of the game. If you can make your employees more productive, you’re going to contribute directly to the bottom line," Robles added.

IP telephony combines multiple communication infrastructure into one, giving users access to voice, data and even video.

This innovation decreases operational costs, simplifies maintenance, and increases workforce productivity.

Cisco’s IP telephony solution is built on the Architecture for Voice Video and Integrated Data (AVVID) to provide the full convergence of data, voice and video.

The Cisco IP phone is an intelligent appliance that sits, as with existing regular or PBX phones, on the desktop.

The similarity, however, ends there because the IP phone offers a wide variety of additional services that are not found in legacy PBX phones.

IP telephony applications are maturing quickly and as a result, businesses will continue to see rapid innovation, more capabilities, and declining prices.