Cisco Embraces the Cloud, Third Party Apps
A day after Cisco’s big partnership with Citrix was announced, the networking company rolled out a big update to Linksys Smart WiFi router series’ firmware. The EA2700, EA3500, and EA4500 consumer boxes now give users access to a lot of new functionality via Cisco Connect Cloud, which also opens up a big opportunity for developers.
Cisco Connect Cloud lets you control your home network from a web-based interface that’s available anywhere, not just locally. More importantly however, it’s a platform that can be extended with third party apps. There are six iOS applications available at the moment, including one that syncs video content between devices and one that lets the user activate any IP camera that’s connected to an EA router.
There’s not a lot of variety on launch day, but Cisco hopes that it will be able to bolster this ecosystem with the Linksys Developer Community. The newly debuted program offers SDKs, sample code and other resources that make it easier for developers to commit to an EA-based project.
“In addition to Cisco Connect Cloud, the new firmware adds many other features, such as a much more robust Web interface, support for universal settings between different routers of the same series, SimpleTap (the ability to connect devices via tapping and near-field communication), and so on.
A second update rolled out this week to Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager. A new feature called Extend and Connect makes it a bit easier to switch phone numbers, and users have more flexibility in choosing the services they want to associate connect to their UCM device. For larger customers that operate call centers, call quality has been made more consistent, more video-enabled endpoints can now be supported and an email address can be associated with a phone number. The licensing model changed as well on top of all that.
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