26th January 2012

Cisco shelf Call Connect for Nokia Platforms

After years of aligning themselves alongside Nokia with regards to Enterprise voice access, Cisco it seems have fallen out of love with them. Today saw the official end of sale of the Nokia Intellisync Call Connect platform, which turned Nokia handsets into WiFi enabled phones capable of interfacing with Cisco’s enterprise telephony products.

The rationale behind this can’t be too hard to guess; Nokia’s market slide, coupled to them using Windows Mobile for their next generation of hardware means that the Symbian based Call Connect platform is no longer relevant to today’s enterprises. Once heralded as a flag ship application by Nokia and Cisco, it’s something of an ignominious exit as it shuffles off the stage having made little to no market penetration.

Cisco are still heavily active in this space with versions of Jabber being available for Android and iPhone which turn your smartphone into a full function Cisco WiFi handset. Blackberry users can also come to the party, although in a much more complicated manner, as it requires the installation of Blackberry MVS server alongside BES. Whilst it works ok, the complexity of the Blackberry solution seems to be a real inhibitor to adoption, and from what we have seen is yet another nail in the enterprise coffin for RIM.

Barry Hesk