Cisco detailed it's Collaboration Strategy and emerging product line for collaboration at it's Collaboration Summit on Monday afternoon. Chairman and CEO John Chambers outlined
Cisco's vision and plan which includes technologies from its collaboration and unified communications portfolio.
Cisco today announced significant product introductions across all categories of its collaboration portfolio. The company also announced its entrance into two new markets, enterprise social software and hosted email, with the goal of bringing the collaborative power of online social communities to businesses.
Some of the strategy is based on years of acquiring front-end technologies such as
PostPath for e-mail and
WebEx for online meetings and combining them with back-end platform services that support secure federation of directory information and media exchange. The
Cisco collaboration platform combines real-time and asynchronous communications and collaboration with some twists. For example,
Cisco's dedicated to Video (communications and content) as a core technology for collaboration.
Many of the ideas that Mr. Chambers presented on how collaboration is key to innovation are not ground breaking if you've been around the collaboration space for any time. He mostly reiterated the value proposition that electronic communications and collaboration have offered for years. However it's been a long awaited conversation from
Cisco and all the talking points are on mark. Like most vendors the semantics and strategy is slightly different; collaboration, for example, in the
Cisco vision leans more to the socialization of content and group interactions and real-time communications supported by
TelePresence (i.e., presence awareness) and video technologies. This is a contemporary perspective that includes social feeds and threading of information based on tags and/or meta-data that many older collaboration solutions are currently retrofitting into their products.
The product announcements are broken into three lines:
Cisco TelePresence,
Cisco Unified Communications, and
Cisco WebEx solutions. A strong connection to real-time
communications over different modes, devices, and networks using open-source technologies are common threads in the strategy. In addition to providing services and presentation layer interfaces
Cisco reiterated its dedication to
extranets and federation of key service
information, like federated
presence awareness or directory information.
It's finally good to know what has happened to
PostPath. Over a year after acquiring the open-source Exchange alternative,
Cisco has subsumed
PostPath into it's
WebEx product line and released a
SaaS-based e-mail package called
WebEx Mail. They are still riding on the value proposition that
WebEx Mail is 100% Outlook compatible and built on open-source technology that makes it easier to extend and manage. While the Outlook point might be valid, management and extensibility is likely only a benefit to
Cisco now that it's a hosted
solution. The offering seems to be along industry
standards with 25GB of mailbox space. Details on data centers and risk management are limited and
Cisco relies on it's hosted
IronPort solution for in-the-cloud content filtering.
The social software and collaboration efforts are even more nascent with only choice customers getting beta access to the service for the next three to six months. Again the offering will be delivered as a
SaaS model. There are some demos on the
Cisco site that illustrate it's social,
Cisco Pulse, and ad-
hoc teaming solution, Show and Share. We'll have to wait to see more on how customers will respond to the tools.
So will this be disruptive to the collaboration market?
Cisco definitely has strong technology and the high-definition video interfaces will be attractive to many customers who rely on teleconferencing.
Cisco's strategy is a network centric vision - which is to be expected. Large global companies that want to create their own secure networks will likely be very interested in the
Cisco solution. Although
Cisco points out that it's platform is extensible, like most collaboration providers, the idea of a single platform for the most fidelity is strong here. Of course for e-mail and collaboration customers will need to weigh the cloud risks, which is still a tough subject when considering the regulatory and legal complexities that global firms face. What I think these offerings do is add yet another better defined platform solution to the choice matrix for customers, which for
Cisco did not exist in a coherent form until now.
For more details on the Collaboration Summit with lots of resources go to
Cisco's Community Central.
Cisco Breaks Down Barriers to Business-to-Business Collaboration -> Cisco News
