"Reuters is relied upon by financial professionals, media organisations, and consumers around the world to provide fast, and accurate, news and financial information. To ensure we meet these goals we require instantaneous global communications," said David Lister, Reuters' chief information officer.
"Delivering efficient communications services over a converged IP network is a fundamental component of 'Smart Working', part of our business transformation programme. We are integrating mobile devices and e-mail with Cisco Unity and IP phones to ensure that our employees have anytime, anywhere access to all types of communications. This mobile unified messaging capability helps us achieve our mission of ensuring our information is trusted and drives decision making across the globe based on our reputation for speed, accuracy, and independence."

Reuters will be deploying Cisco technologies extensively to create a secure Internet Protocol (IP)-based network infrastructure that will support all of its business communications requirements including voice, data, video telephony and IP TV.

Reuters selected Cisco Unity Unified Messaging for more than 4,600 users as a part of its global IP Communications solution that will be used to improve productivity and flexibility while reducing overall communications costs. By integrating Cisco Unity with their Microsoft Exchange e-mail environment, Reuters is providing access to voice messages from the Outlook inbox, as well as text-to-speech access to e-mail messages from mobile phones, and SMS notification of new voice messages. The financial information company also plans to consolidate voice and e-mail directory services to reduce costs associated with distribution lists, message storage, transport and other ongoing operational expenses.

"Reuters' unified communications solution is a prime example of how customers are converging the user experience through the power of IP," said Tim Stone, head of IP Communications marketiing for EMEA, Cisco Systems. "Our market momentum in messaging is increasing rapidly as more enterprises realize a direct competitive advantage by completely integrating applications and virtualizing services across an intelligent network infrastructure."

Tim Stone marked the delivery of the 3 millionth Cisco Unity licence with a presentation to David Lister at Reuters' Fleet Street headquarters in London.

In December 2003, Cisco announced that it had delivered its 2 millionth Unity seat, a milestone that took the company nearly three years to achieve.
Since then, Cisco has shipped an additional 1 million messaging seats to customers. Cisco's next generation of unified communications systems are helping more than 12,000 organizations worldwide realize the benefits of anytime, anywhere communications to increase business productivity and flexibility.