It said the relationship would first focus on integration of its Citrix Application Gateway and Office Voice products with Cisco's Unified Call Manager and Unified Presence Server. The combination will provide the SIP-based user presence and "click to call" capabilities to Voice Office on Cisco IP telephones and enterprise applications with Smart Agent technology.

Elizabeth Herrell, vice president at Forrester Research, said companies were looking for such integration to "eliminate a lot of the steps that slows businesses down."

She said delays due to ineffective communications were eroding worker productivity. Better real-time accessibility of colleagues and customers, such as with presence and click to call, improved responsiveness.

Citrix's Thirumale said integrating voice with applications at the desktop level was happening widely, but blending voice capabilities with hosted enterprise applications at this scale was a big step.

He said it was going to be a challenge to merge enterprise apps with the latest voice features.