7/24/2006 -- Cisco Systems Inc.'s acquisitions last month of privately held Metreos Corp. and Audium Corp. helped strengthen its contact center portfolio and -- as an added bonus -- greased the skids for its transition to a service-oriented network architecture (SONA), to boot.

Both companies develop drag-and-drop application design and integration environments that will let Cisco customers and partners build customized communications applications. "[T]he VoiceXML-based and other tools developed by Metreos and Audium will be key to Cisco delivering on its Service Oriented Network Architecture vision, providing customers with communications building blocks that can be integrated into enterprise customers' presently deployed application infrastructures," write Brian Riggs and Joe Outlaw, analysts with consultancy Current Analysis. Metreos sells an application environment that lets enterprise and system integration developers add voice-specific communications capabilities (e.g., text-to-speech, voice recognition and multiparty conferencing) to business applications, Riggs and Outlaw note, while Audium sells standards-based (VXML) self-service and contact center application development tools.

What's in it for Cisco customers? Plenty -- at least eventually -- Riggs and Outlaw explain. "Upon integrating Metreos' assets into its overall business model Cisco will be able to present customers with a simple means of integrating text-to-speech, interactive voice response, and other voice-based functionality into their businesses' application infrastructure," they write. "Both Metreos and Audium have long specialized in Cisco products and have worked through some of Cisco's key channel partners, including Spanlink, Dimension Data and eLoyalty. Metreos' packaged PhoneProxy and ClusterMobility apps, for example, have been developed specifically for CallManager environments. This focus on Cisco technology promises to jumpstart the integration of both companies' development environments into Cisco's Service Oriented Network Architecture."

Cisco won't exactly be force-feeding Audiium and Metreos down customers' throats, either, the duo note.

"Metreos' and Audium's development environments have previously been available to Cisco customers and in fact have long been used in several key accounts. Cisco's acquisition of the companies will bring product development in-house, but in the near term will not provide Cisco customers with products and technologies not already available to them," they observe. -Stephen Swoyer