Cisco Systems today announced a new series of package enterprise applications that marks perhaps the company’s first concerted effort to get away from the business model that relies heavily on selling hardware,

The new Cisco Unified Communications system is based on the vendor’s Service-Oriented Network Architecture, which was announced last year. The system, which will be distributed by Cisco’s existing channels including carriers, also has a significant dependence on presence, mobility and the intelligent information network. Naturally, the system assumes a largely IP network as well within the enterprise and integration with data networks.

“This notion of communications in the pre-IP days was all about dial tone. Now it’s more about video telephony and multimedia,” said Rick McConnell, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Unified Communications unit. “The market has really changed in terms of the perception of communications.”

Unified Communications system is based on the company’s existing portfolio including its Cisco CallManager, Cisco Unity, Cisco MeetingPlace and Cisco IP Contact Center but tacks on additional products, applications, features and capabilities. Among the more innovative developments are what the company has dubbed the Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco Unified Presence Server and Customer Interaction Analyzer. With the presence server, the vendor is trying to bring a contextual element to presence management, something McConnell said will be significant as more instant messaging users flood into the corporate world.

“We’ve all become human middleware,” he said. “In a presence-based world, people now how I’m reachable and by what means I’m reachable. Or I can say, ‘I’m available to you but not to anyone else.’ This next generation worker is going to expect IM and a lot of different means of communications.”

Perhaps even more significant is that the system begins to get Cisco out of the box mentality.

“Heretofore I would argue that we have been delivering products,” said McConnell.

The business model for Unified Communications relies much more on applications and services. And because the system is based on SIP all the way to the desktop, McConnell said the company will be able to call upon the large community of SIP developers.

“We have not tried to subsume all of our applications into a single intergalactic application,” McConnell said. “The objective has been to provide a portal into those applications.”