Cisco this week rolled out a new collaboration product portfolio designed to help companies accelerate business processes and increase productivity, and further mine a $34 billion market for Cisco. (Compare collaboration products.)

Additions to the Cisco collaboration portfolio include a new release of the company's Unified Communications software (compare unified communications products), a WebEx-enabled product for Web meetings with integrated presence and IM, and TelePresence customer service. The products are also intended to buttress Cisco’s focus on the network as the nerve center for the collaboration experience.

Cisco contends that the network as a collaboration platform fosters integration between business applications, communications devices and Web-based tools, while allowing IT departments to maintain their mandates regarding security, policy and compliance. Microsoft comes at it from a software perspective (see a head-to-head comparison of Microsoft and Cisco UC products), while IBM touts systems, server and software as the optimal collaboration platform.

"It's one of the first proof points Cisco's had around the concept of network-as-a-platform," says Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala on this week's collaboration rollout.

Deeper integration with desktops in those IBM and Microsoft environments is one of the features of Cisco's Unified Communications Release 7.0 software. Another is mobility, with additions that help extend collaboration features across workspaces.

Still another is Cisco Mobile Communicator support for devices running on Windows Mobile as well as Symbian and BlackBerry operating systems. Unified Communications 7.0 also scales Cisco Unified Presence to 30,000 users and Cisco Unity to 15,000 users on a single server, Cisco says.

The new WebEx product is called WebEx Connect. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platform for collaborative business mashups that integrates presence, instant messaging, Web meetings and team spaces with traditional and Web 2.0 business applications.

"It's the first time one of the major UC vendors decided to go to market with an online, SaaS-based offering," Kerravala says. "The whole idea behind WebEx Connect is to allow developers to be able to access a lot of the UC elements from the cloud. It's the cloud version of UC."