Cisco Launches Green Suite For Remote Workers

The Cisco Virtual Office (CVO) ties together routing, switching, security, wireless, IP telephony and policy control into a centrally-managed remote solution for secure video, voice, data and wireless service.

And San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco is stepping up to eat its own dog food. It has deploying its new CVO solution to more than 12,000 of the company's own teleworkers in 70 countries, as part of CEO and chairman John Chambers' bid to have Cisco itself cut its carbon emissions by 25 percent over the next four years. Cisco expects 20,000 employees to use CVO by 2009 and 30,000 by 2010.

Within Cisco, 85 percent of global employees spend time working from home, averaging 24 percent of their work time from home. Overall, users gain 2.75 productive work hours per week from reduced commuting time and ultimately avoid an average of 36.4 commuting miles per day, or avoiding nearly 64 million driving miles per year.

For companies deploying the CVO, it consists of a Cisco 800 Series Integrated Services Router and a Cisco Unified IP Phone 7900 Series at the remote site. To run the system at the head-end site, a Cisco 7200 series VPN aggregation router, Cisco Security Manager, Cisco Secure ACS and a configuration engine are deployed. The system starts at about $700 per seat.

Mick Scully, vice president of product management for Cisco's security technology group, said tying together the solution brings the look and feel of the office to employees who work from home all within a highly secure architecture, giving them access to voice, data and video services they come to expect in an office setting.

It also can help companies realize a green initiative, but cutting carbon emissions from having workers commute and travel for meetings.

"Every large corporation across the globe is looking at green," Scully said, adding that a green initiative makes not only good economic sense for a company, but it also shows a level of environmental responsibility.

Bob Berlin, director of product management for Cisco's network security division, agreed.

"This is truly a Cisco on Cisco story," he said. "We needed something more elegant to service employees all over the world."

CVO evolved out of its Enterprise Class Teleworker (ECT) solution. ECT enabled employees to work from home and have the access to the same applications, phone calls and collaboration tools that they had in the office in a secure environment. With the success of ECT, it dawned on Cisco that other organizations, outside of Cisco itself, could benefit from a solution. There the CVO was born.

"We should move ahead and put a productization around this solution and market it," Berlin said.

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