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Cisco has announced a range of products designed to improve communications and the use of social networking in enterprises.

The company highlighted a number of areas in which it is making improvements, including new IP phones and a Web 2.0 collaboration platform.

“Collaboration is a mega trend. Companies are more global, and their workers are more mobile, and those in offices are requesting access to the sort of applications that they use at home,” said Tim Stone, head of collaboration solutions at Cisco.

Stone explained that mobile workers are presented with a wealth of documents to handle, claiming that Cisco can help to manage this information and allow workers to use it in a collaborative manner, for example by applying real-time messaging to the content.

Cisco’s new 8900 and 9900 series of handsets meet low energy standards, and offer wireless connectivity, high-quality video and links to the firm’s WebEx conferencing platform.

The firm also announced an enterprise collaboration platform that brings Web 2.0 tools to enterprises, allowing users to share wikis, blogs and other information. Chat tools based on Cisco’s acquisition of Jabber provide access to a range of instant messaging applications, including Google Talk and products from IBM and Microsoft.

Cisco Show and Share, meanwhile, will let firms easily share videos and other quickly created content. Stone said that Cisco uses it in-house for company presentations, adding that such tools will soon become the norm in enterprises by replacing internal company email and HR notice boards, for example.

Cisco has also moved into the hosted email market with out-of-the-box support for Outlook on smartphones and browser-based clients. Initially launching in the US and Canada, the application features security capabilities acquired through Cisco’s recent purchase of Ironport.

“Businesses require a new environment for people to collaborate within or outside the company,” said Stone. “These are the kinds of tools that users want, and we have made them suitable for the enterprise.”

A new version of Session Management Edition will let firms build up a SIP network over their legacy telephony systems, which Stone said could act as a bridge as companies move over to newer networks.

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Two corporate giants are cooperating in what they call an effort to expand the availability of telemedicine in both rural and urban areas that are medically underserved.

UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest health plan by revenue, and Cisco, the Silicon Valley networking corporation, announced in July that they will cooperate on equipping a national network of doctors to care for patients via high-definition cameras and remote monitoring devices.

Ultimately, the project, called Connected Care, is expected to connect clinics, physician offices, workplace-based clinics, mobile clinics and even patients’ homes, said Jim Woodburn, MD, vice president and medical director of telehealth for United.

The project kicked off a pilot program in New Mexico in collaboration with the Washington-based nonprofit Project HOPE, which works to expand access to medical care and education across the world.

“From the perspective of Project HOPE, this is a huge deal,” said Rand Walton, a spokesman for the nonprofit.

The Connected Care network, meanwhile, will set up in multiple locations, including work sites, doctors’ offices and mobile clinics, Dr. Woodburn said. He said United likely would build the Connected Care network beginning with primary care physicians in an effort to address the shortage of primary care in underserved areas.

United will pay for the telemedicine visits and expects the claims and payments to work in basically the same way face-to-face visits work, Dr. Woodburn said.

For United, which said in its announcement it would spend “tens of millions of dollars” on the project, the opportunity for savings is a part of the motivation to invest in telehealth, Dr. Woodburn said.

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Cisco Systems has reported an 18% fall in quarterly revenue as customers held back spending on network equipment, but the decline was mostly in line with Wall Street forecasts and its profit was better than expected.

Chief executive John Chambers also said the company saw ‘a number of positive signs’ in its fourth financial quarter compared with the previous three months.

‘If we continue to see these positive order trends for the next one to two quarters, we believe there is a good chance we will look back and see that the tipping point occurred in our business in Q4,’ he said in a statement.

Revenue in the quarter which ended on July 25 fell to $8.5 billion from $10.4 billion in the same period a year earlier. That was in line with Wall Street’s average forecast.

Quarterly net profit fell to $1.1 billion, or 19 cents a share, from $2 billion, or 33 cents a share, a year ago. Earnings excluding once-off items were 31 cents.

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