Demand for PresenceManager is strong across all vertical markets, and successful deployments have already been made for large customers in the education vertical market including Corpus Christi and Katy Independent School Districts.

Presence Engines allow IP phone users and administrators to tailor their environments based on multiple factors, including physical presence and availability. The Cistera ConvergenceServer™ uses PresenceManager to appropriately deliver, record and playback calls, to present notifications and events correctly and to allow a more comprehensive real-time directory view of an organization.

"In order for customers to transition from traditional telephony to VoIP, we need to ensure the availability of features they have come to depend on. What used to be called 'Do-Not-Disturb' or 'Time-of-Day Restrictions' are actually early implementations of what is now known in the industry as 'Presence,'" said Cistera Networks CTO Greg Royal. "We took those initial features and brought them into the 21st century, while adding additional functionality that is available in a VoIP environment."

Cistera is one of only a handful of vendors that can deliver both "local" presence, where users set their own presence, and "global" presence, where the administrator can set the presence of large numbers of phones. "We have one customer that can set the presence of over 6,500 phones on a daily basis. The Cistera ConvergenceServer manages and routes over 10,000 calls a day for that customer through Cistera PresenceManager," said Royal.

"Because we natively support Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) on our platform, we can extend it to include SIMPLE (SIP for Instant Messaging and Presence Level Extensions) platforms such as the Microsoft Live Communications Server (LCS) 2007, and Cisco's Communicator products," continued Royal.

The Cistera ConvergenceServer (CCS), with its robust suite of application engines, offers customers IPT applications that are easy to integrate and install. The CCS adds critical competency and features such as text and audio broadcasting, messaging, recording and content streaming within Cisco and Nortel Converged Communications environments.

Source: Cistera