UCStrategies Experts Discuss the Cisco Collaboration Summit

Transcript for UCStrategies Experts Discuss the Cisco Collaboration Summit

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant; I am here with my UCStrategies colleagues, and several of us were in Miami last week at the beautiful Fontainebleau Hotel at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. The topic, of course, was collaboration, and it is interesting that when this summit started several years ago, it started as the IP Summit, then it because the Unified Communications Summit and for the past two years, it was the Collaboration Summit. We really got an earful about collaboration and what Cisco is doing in that area. We heard a lot about Quad and about WebEx and the changes that are going on with WebEx. We heard some about video and telepresence, and I think it was nice the way Cisco is trying to bring all these things together. So what started off as siloes, Cisco is doing a good job of integrating and bringing some of these things together.

I loved what Barry O’Sullivan said, “don’t deploy another silo, think about mobile, social, visual, and virtual when you plan your strategy, and put people in the center of collaboration.” Also he mentioned (to) embed collaboration in your business processes. So whether you consider UC as part of collaboration or collaboration as part of UC, the emphasis that I heard over and over, was the integration with business processes, which anyone who has been listening to our podcasts or reading our blogs and articles, knows how important integration with business processes is. So David Yedwab, you were there.

David Yedwab: Hello everyone and thank you Blair for introducing me. And I would like to sort of point out what I believe is a new trend within the collaboration space and within Cisco’s business overall. I sense a strong shift away from Cisco’s hardware sales model to a focus on software, software applications, to affect business processes as we have been talking about with several of their key announcements around software development kits being added to several of their collaboration products, like WebEx, Jabber, Quad, etc. And I believe that it is an interesting trend. And in speaking to several of the partners that were in attendance at the conference that ran in parallel to our Analyst and Consultant Summit, they sense the software shift being major, and of major concern for them as their businesses evolve, to become less box pushing and more applications and software-centric.

Nancy Jamison: It was a great conference again, I have been to, I think, all four. And there is a change but I am not going to focus on the change in theme, I think somebody else is going to talk about that. But I really like the fact that Cisco has, from five years ago when they introduced the telepresence and then to now, the kind of vast amount of any device, any size company, any delivery so they have so many different schools and they are working on the back end to integrate them together. So, for example, having a common identity system that you can log in anywhere and have it proliferate across telepresence or Jabber or WebEx, or whatever. So I saw the theme as being video and dloud, not so much the other things that Blair mentioned up front. I didn’t see that; I mean they mentioned being social and mobile and all that, but we just got hit with video and cloud completely.

But one of the things that I actually really enjoyed was the discussion around the idea of a persistent meeting. And really, as Blair mentioned, them working on collaboration along with business process. So if you have a meeting, you don’t just have a meeting and leave. They have a meeting space so you can like book things in advance and you can schedule it and you can have a shared document file system and you can prepare for the meeting. And then you can have the meeting, over like I said, any video device, or any device, audio or whatever, and then you leave the meeting open and you can come back later and check progress and be able to share documents and update documents and all of that. So I was kind of impressed with that whole idea and the work they are doing around it.

One of the things that struck me is they had these panels of customers speaking. And David Wright of Bank of America made a really good point in that even if they have these tools like Quad and we have these great collaboration things, if you do not make them sticky and you do not make them in a way that people will just kind of use them and if they do not get used to using them, or like to use them, then they won’t. And he gave examples maybe that at least within his company if people are using Salesforce all the time, you do not want to make them use a different tool so you will have to take something like Quad and bring Salesforce into it to make it sticky and usable.

So to kind of sum it up, I really like the fact that over the five years that we have been going to these conferences, that Cisco really has done a fabulous job of creating tools and applications and devices that will allow any business of any size, on any device and what have you to use them. And the next challenge is going to be making those things sticky so that people will use them more.

Marty Parker: So this is Marty Parker, thank you Nancy for those comments. I also very much appreciated Cisco inviting us to the Collaboration Summit. It was a very well done event. They certainly had the top executives on stage and available throughout the conference so quite well done and very much appreciated. As I think you have captured in the previous comments, there really was an emphasis on some key themes and as always, Cisco does a real good job of keeping their message front and center – certainly the word collaboration, which seems to me to be more of a brand that is being applied to their collection of technologies. But it was also being used as a representation of a whole new application space and the new way that businesses will operate and so forth. We will see if that part comes true. But it certainly was being used well as a brand and as Blair mentioned, mobile, social, virtual, and visual were the representations of that.

Sometimes the message didn’t quite match the content. Collaboration was being represented as perhaps something new that Cisco had invented, something different from the rest of the industry, but the content and many of the cases in the customer examples they gave, were still very much in the zone of unified communications. It was conferencing centric, mobility centric, CEBP, communications enabled business process centric, and social centric. While some may think social is not part of unified communications, social networking has really been existing in business since about the mid 80’s, and there is a lot of cases for that. So I think Cisco is actually bringing many of those pieces into focus but not necessarily having invented them, rather bringing them to focus, which is always a helpful thing.

Another emphasis point was people centric, yet the examples were really about improving business processes and accelerating transactions and streamlining collaborative processes. It wasn’t clear that everything was people centric, in fact it seemed to be more about transaction centric and process-centric work, which represents how businesses operate. So clearly people need to be in those processes and need to be in them efficiently. And I think that message was there. But again, the name people centric may have over emphasized just the individual nature of communications.

I also thought that their bringing WebEx, Jabber, and Quad was quite appropriate and seems to have a lot of potential. I will be excited to see it when it is released and it actually is in a software release into a very mature market since the idea of persistent workspaces has been around for over a decade. And so I think the Cisco channels may find themselves with some heavy lifting to do if they try to penetrate existing collaborative software markets.

Another emphasis was on video as the core to collaboration. Though it is pretty clear that IM and presence and persistent workspaces may be equally as important and video may not be necessary in every case. But again, Cisco has been creative there in bringing new ideas to the table.

A couple of other points. They constantly were using the term post-PC era because they were focusing on how many new mobile devices, tablets, and smart phones and so forth were coming to market. It seems to me that for the next decade, we are probably going to be in the co-PC era as people with desktops and laptops will continue to use those for the more content rich applications, while also using the mobile devices when appropriate.

And then finally, in the whole two days of meetings, there wasn’t much mentioned, hardly any mention of Cisco Unified Communications Manager. It was surprising to me because that product is really core to the business and I think key to their strategy of call control, Cisco’s strategy of having the call control in the business enterprise. So it will be a interesting to see if Cisco’s investment and innovation and development are actually moving to other products and Cisco Unified Communication Manager still gets as much attention as it has in the past. So I found it to be a very helpful conference, a lot of innovative ideas from Cisco, while at the same time, raising a few challenges and issues that we can watch as they unfold in the marketplace.

Jon Arnold: This is my third Cisco collaboration conference that I have been to over the last couple of years and I have seen a lot of interesting things, as we all have, I am sure. But from my mind, what is really interesting is the way their collaboration portfolio and vision has really come into focus over these past three years. The value proposition they are touting now is very much based on a mix, to me, of both network-centric applications and capabilities, which is really good news for the IT people, but also the people-centric applications and benefits that we heard and saw a lot about this last week there in Miami. I really like that balance that they are bringing to the events and how they trying to communicate the messaging to us here in the analyst community. That is one piece that I really found interesting.

Another one, which I think all of us who were there would agree, is that we heard very little discussion about using the language of unified communications. They tend to talk instead about unified conferencing. So they really are trying to set the agenda with their own language here. But that is okay. I think the idea here is the message that we should be hearing and taking back to our world is that UC as a concept is pretty fluid and not everyone is going to want to call it that. But I think at the end of the day, all of these various flavors are leading to the same outcome. And that is, providing a seamless platform for end users to become more productive, etc. all the things we always talk about. But I don’t see Cisco ever using that language. So I think that is something we have to really learn to live with and find ways to incorporate into what we say to our clients and what we write about out there.

Another thing, too, that I thought was very good about the event was how they brought customers into the equation and we really got to hear a variety of application scenarios that were really relevant for me. In particular, they had a discussion from an oil & gas company called MODEC and it was really interesting to hear, because the speaker from that company was an older guy and he made it very clear that it's a traditional segment. Most of the people in their business and in their industry are north of (age) 50 and for them, they are slow obviously to adopt tools. But the interesting challenge for them was how they get these older engineers to share knowledge and information, contacts, etc., with the younger generation of engineers.

So there were a lot of interesting kind of generational issues around what UC really can mean to people and more importantly, how they adopt it. I think he made a very important point that there were a lot of cultural challenges there and the bottom line takeaway was that you really have to let people adopt the technology in comfortable environments. So in other words one of those takeaways for me was that you can’t expect people who have never used video to just put them into an immersive telepresence experience and expect them to feel comfortable. If being at their desk and on the phone is where they work best and then that is the environment I think you have to cater to. I think that just speaks to the bigger picture here that I saw and that was the definition of what constitutes the UC-type experience is going to be very broad. I think that the successful vendors going to market will realize that and instead of talking about a very fixed set of solutions for a narrow set of scenarios, to really talk about the flexibility and adaptability of UC applications. I think this is where Cisco really comes through nicely because being network centric; they can support all these end use cases.

And the last thing I will say on that is they had another very good demo, where they showed in one session how Cius, telepresence systems, a Mac, a PC, all these various interfaces could seamlessly go back and forth across these devices. And when you can do that, it takes all the complexity out of the equation and makes it a very kind of natural and intuitive experience. I think that is ultimately what all the vendors are striving for and I think where we would all like to see UC become.

So for my money, I think Cisco has a pretty good take on what it takes to make UC relevant, even if they don’t call it that.

Don Van Doren: I think first of all, I agree with a lot of the points that has been made here. I found it an extremely interesting and valuable conference. To echo one of David Yedwab’s points, it’s interesting how the partners are reacting to some of these things. I talked to a couple about the hosted collaboration solution emphasis that Cisco is making and there are a lot of people scratching their heads about how they are going to adopt their business model to make sense of that. I think another interesting thing that came out of this what about Jabber. Clearly Cisco is making that into a more all-encompassing brand and that’s, I think, going to have some significant implications going forward, and good ones, frankly. I’m delighted to see that they’re doing that.

I also listened a lot to what was going on in the call center/contact center space. I actually stayed for the extra half-day session that they did on that specifically. John Hernandez could barely contain himself with all his joy at the way Cisco is moving ahead aggressively. They clearly feel, at least from my perspective, they clearly feel that they are in a strong position to really challenge the leadership that Avaya has had in that business now. They feel that they have got their solutions together, they have plugged a lot of the gaps that have been in the product before. They have solved a lot of the server problems that they have had in the past. And they feel very strongly that they are in an excellent position to really capitalize both on their own strengths but also on what they perceive as the weaknesses of some of their competitors. So it will be an interesting time going forward.

And finally, just as Marty was spelling out the co-PC concept, the acronym that popped into my mind was COPE, and I think that is what we’re going to be actually doing there a lot, as we try and make this transition, because there are a lot transitions coming.

Blair Pleasant: Well thanks Don, and thanks everybody. So we talked a lot about what we heard. One thing I didn’t hear is much talk about interoperability. And Cisco is doing a great job of integrating and tying in all of their solutions together. But we did not hear too much about interoperability. Does anybody want to address that? What your takeaways are on that?

Don Van Doran: I asked that question in one of the sessions, specifically about what their plans were, and they sort of fell back on discussion of standards. That is one of the places where they sort of talked about Jabber and what they intend to do going forward with that. But again, I don’t sense that they have a very strong message in that area at this point Blair.

Blair Pleasant: I would tend to agree, but I think as far as bringing their portfolio together and really making it easy for their customers to have a more integrated solution, I think they are doing a good job. They also talked a lot about the Cius. What do you guys think about the Cius and do you think there is a role for it or do you think it will just go away and people are going to use the iPad?

Marty Parker: It is pretty clear that there are some big patterns emerging in the market. For some business applications where the device needs to be tightly secured, the device needs to follow a certain form factor, and the device needs to be managed from within the enterprise, on an app store basis and so forth. There probably is a market for the single vendor solution including a Cius, in Cisco’s case.

Blair Pleasant: I would agree.

Marty Parker: On the other hand, there was certainly a mention, there were many, many, mentions by Cisco of the emphasis on bring your own device, that is, that these consumer devices – that is why they talked about the post-PC era so often is they felt that their consumer devices were going to flood the enterprise. They had a gentleman, David Wright, from Bank of America, talking about Bank of America’s approach to the BYOD environment, which Bank of America has embraced. If we have a BYOD environment, then most people are not going to buy a Cius at the Apple Store, they are going to buy an iPad. And they are going to buy Android devices and so on and so forth as we see from the sales data in the market. So I think it is yet to be seen, Blair. I think there will be patterns in the market where the enterprise will need to pay for and buy and sponsor the device. And the Cius probably fits there. But everywhere else it is going to be BYOD, great. Those won’t be the Cius.

Blair Pleasant: Well Marty, it is interesting that you mentioned Bank of America and BYOD, because I had dinner with the B of A guy and I asked him why – he said that they are looking to the Cius. And I asked him point blank, why are you considering the Cius as opposed to the iPad or BYOD. And he gave me an earful, he was just passionate about the Cius and having a purpose-built device and using it for communications whereas the iPad isn’t really the right device for communications. And I think they are going to be very big users of the Cius down the road. So even though –

Marty Parker: It’s funny how that sort of flies in the face of what he said on stage, that they are a BYOD company.

Blair Pleasant: Yeah, I think there is going to be use cases for both.

Marty Parker: Right.

Blair Pleasant: But he was very passionate about the Cius and how they are going to be embracing that, so interesting.

Marty Parker: Which things go where, right.

Art Rosenberg: I just wanted to make a comment, exactly that. Individual users are going to BYOD, period. Whatever it is they want they are going to do. On top of that, the enterprise is going to say, but here is an area, here is an application, here is a device that we want you to us, like in healthcare and so on. So it is going to be a combination of the two, not one or the other.

Blair Pleasant: Yep, absolutely.

Don Van Doran: The other comment I would make, Blair on this topic is that, I think the tablet market is still in a very evolutionary state. The fact that it is a two-handed device in many cases is a limitation of its use in some business purposes. So I think we are going to see, perhaps more wall-mounted devices with a clear touch base, tabletops that are touch based. We may see the evolution to wearable visual devices such as the sort of advanced eyeglasses that are coming out of the military where you can basically wear a device and see what you need to see. And touch pads or a trackball that can be manipulated with your thumb and finger without having to touch a piece of glass. I think there is a lot of change coming in the market. And so I think BYOD is important, but it will be changing a lot. Speech recognition is probably another major factor where we see Apple putting their Suri product in there and a number of other examples in automobiles and other places where people will get used to that as well. So I think the user input and output market, which is really what we are talking about, with tablets, is really in flux. And we may look back 10 years from now and say, wasn’t it fine while the tablets were here.

Blair Pleasant: It was the same thing when PDA’s first came out we all thought PDA’s were going to be replacing a lot of what we were using at the time, and they are kind of gone now. Thank you everybody, good insights and appreciate your time and we will see you next week.