Cisco and Collaboration – The Next Phase of Unified Communications

Posted by Blair Pleasant, on September 28, 2008

I just spent two and a half days at the Cisco UC and Collaboration Analyst conference in San Diego, and my brain is overloaded from all the announcements and new releases. Rather than gradually releasing new products and updates throughout the year, Cisco did it all at once – including its next gen collaboration platform built on Unified Communications 7.0, plus the new Telepresence Expert on Demand, and WebEx Connect.
Cisco UC 7.0 includes 800 new product capabilities, of which we barely touched the surface during the conference. Some of the new capabilities that most interested me include interoperability and better integration with IBM Sametime and Microsoft OCS, allowing for capabilities like click-to-conference, integration with Microsoft Office to enable click-to-call from Microsoft Office, and inter-domain presence federation allowing companies using OCS and Cisco UC to share presence information.

And of course the big announcement was WebEx Connect. I’ve been using the beta version of WebEx Connect for a few weeks and it has some very cool features and capabilities – but I can’t wait until it provides Macintosh support in an upcoming release (I’ve been running it under Parallels, which lets me use the Windows operating system on my Mac).

As you probably know by now, WebEx Connect is a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based collaboration platform, written with open standards and APIs, providing a range of capabilities including IM, team spaces, shared work spaces, voice/video/web meetings, document management, etc. – all with a common user interface. A team space is a virtual place where teams can meet providing a collaborative workspace with group discussions, persistent chat, document sharing, etc.

Widgets are used to integrate new and existing capabilities and applications in WebEx Connect – there is a widget for click-to-call, visual voice mail, softphone, etc. Widgets will also allow for integration with enterprise applications – for example, if you want to use Sharepoint for document management you can add a Sharepoint widget to WebEx Connect. Cisco will provide APIs to partners so they can build applets and widgets to customize their offerings. Widgets are the key to customization, and there are also business widgets such as calendar, task, bulletin board, etc for users to customize each team space.

Email and calendaring will be added based on the PostPath acquisition, providing users with an alternative to premise-based Exchange (although I wouldn’t sell my Microsoft stock just yet based on this).
One item that didn’t get as much press coverage as I had expected was the Cisco WebEx MediaTone Network. This scalable and reliable network lets Cisco deliver the WebEx Connect/SaaS experience through its nine-globally linked data centers, providing 5 9s reliability. The new Cisco Collaboration Architecture will bring the Cisco Intelligent Network on-premise network together with the WebEx MediaTone on-demand network, providing what Cisco claims is a secure intelligent network with open web services. Call control, video, presence, location, etc. are all exposed as sets of web services that partners can build into applications

Cisco considers WebEx Connect more than a collaboration service, but a development platform with open APIs that lets companies add collaboration to any process. As an extensible collaboration platform, users can create simple mashups or custom applications using common services that are available to developers, such as search, notify, analyze, etc. The application framework is based on AJAX open source language and supports the reusing of components.

There’s been lots of discussion in the blogosphere about whether Cisco will get the developers they need to help WebEx Connect succeed. Some Cisco partners will want to develop their own widgets and applications for WebEx Connect, and will be able to resell these applications to customers and potentially other partners. Cisco will have several integration workshops starting in November to train partners on integrating WebEx Connect with applications and widgets. While Cisco doesn’t have the development community that Microsoft and IBM have, I expect a few partners will develop some vital application integrations and be able to resell them to other partners and customers. Cisco also recently added Jabber developers to its list of developer partners, who will be able to help integrate rich presence and collaboration tools to business applications.

My concern about WebEx Connect isn’t so much about whether it will get the critical mass of application developers needed, but whether customers will opt for a software-as-a-service approach to UC and collaboration, rather than a premise-based solution. We’ll have to wait and see how customers feel about getting more capabilities from the cloud.


 

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Comments:

Comment posted by brendan adams, on September 29, 2008

Very nice article Blair, with, as ever, excellent insight. Over here in the UK, I think companies like Cisco and others will struggle to move businesses away from CPE solutions. Managed and Hosted services are not as widespread over here anyway (and very market specific). I suspect that, albeit over time, SaaS will grow, the vendors will ultimately bow to the CPE requirements.

Comment posted by Marty, on September 29, 2008

Thanks, Blair, for summarizing the Cisco Analysts and Consultants conference. As a fellow attendee, you've captured the content and themes very well, as usual.

If I may, here are some added perspectives:

Cisco has not defined a new market, but rather joined an existing and robust market for collaboration tools. IBM and Google have been offering collaboration spaces with Web 2.0 features (widgets, mash-ups, etc.) for several years now and Microsoft is in the game with Microsoft Office Live. And these are just the big players, as there are numerous others. My compliments to Cisco for reaching into this UC space from a voice and video communications base, but our UCStrategies.com readers will want to look at the options.

It is noteworthy that Cisco chose to take the federation approach to link their Cisco Unified Communications Manager presence status to Microsoft OCS rather than exposing the presence indications directly to OCS, which some other voice/video communication producers have done.  This approach requires that the Cisco customer install and maintain the Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS) (often involving multiple servers, for enterprise-wide support) in order to provide federated presence. For those customers that choose Microsoft OCS for their desktop communication client, the CUPS servers just add to the TCO of the Cisco solutions.

It is clear that Cisco is moving quickly and aggressively to provide a broader solution set for knowledge workers. This will lead to a pretty dynamic roadmap for Cisco's new and installed base customers over the next 3 to 5 years. As always, Cisco is pushing forward in the UC industry! They deserve credit for their energy and vision.

Comment posted by Blair Pleasant, on October 11, 2008

Thanks Brendan. I would tend to agree with you about managed and hosted services outside of the US. It's still very early in the SaaS arena and there's just a segment of the market that it will appeal to, but it opens up UC to small and medium sized companies that may not otherwise be able to implement these technologies.