Just announced at the Cisco Partner Summit yesterday, Cisco is making Unified Presence, IM and it's Jabber client for Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Cisco Cius, Blackberry and all Android devices completely FREE. This probably has something to do with how badly they've been spanked in Presence server and client sales by Microsoft basically giving away the presence features of Lync (although MS does make you pay when you want to add Voice/Video features to those clients - just as Cisco will). At any rate and for whatever their reasons and motivations - I personally think it is a very, very smart move for Cisco. It's also one that makes complete sense seeing that UCM v9 is about to go into beta testing next week. Understanding that the Jabber client can interact with video from any IP phone or Telepresence unit, and the fact that Cisco announced that this free Jabber client and Presence support is not only for those with existing IP Phones, but for every member of any enterprise with a UCM server, this makes the announcement all that more powerful. This doesn't include Voice or Video, but those can be enabled later with a simple license upgrade. Still not bad at all - especially with the new Jabber client for Windows, and the fact that once installed it enables all MS Office apps to have native presence tied into them directly to Cisco Jabber. This was the entire reason that Cisco purchased Jabber.

Another thing that Cisco is making free (at least for some limited time) is their WebEx Meetings Beta offering - for up to 25 participants. This includes desktop sharing and VoIP as well. Sign up here.

Also of no small merit, Cisco just shipped its 50 millionth phone - that's 50,000,000 phones shipped. I still remember putting in my first Selsius Call Manager more than 13 years ago. Not bad Cisco, not bad at all.