While voip may still not be lining the pockets of IT vendors with gold the technology is still one of the largest drivers of growth within the network infrastructure market. Given that Cisco are the largest company in the network equipment market they are getting their fare share of voip enabled PBX business. Cisco’s Call Manager has been in the market place for around five years but in the past year the product has gone through a number of significant changes:

• CCM 5 has moved from a Microsoft platform to Linux (CCM 4.3 is still windows based but all future develop will be Linux)
• They’ve moved away from the proprietary Cisco SCCP protocol to a standards based SIP build on the server and all their phones
• Finally and perhaps with less meat on the bone at the moment John Chambers is trying to drive Cisco into the collaboration and social networking space and I’d assume CCM is a core element of the strategy.

Many companies are currently merging their telecoms department into their IT department. When a PBX replacement is sort by a business it now seems to be the IT department that holds sway. This is good news for Cisco given that they are so dominant in Enterprise IT the natural fit for a new PBX is the Callmanger.

But should IT Departments be so quick to implement the full Cisco solution? Check back over the next day or so to see where Call Manager and an Asterisk/Trixbox combination can work in harmony and provide significant benefits.