Cisco Collaboration Summit – What’s UC?
Cisco Collaboration Summit – What’s UC? by Jon Arnold
A number of UCStrategies contributors attended Cisco’s Collaboration Summit last week in Miami Beach, and I think we came away with similar impressions. Cisco always does a great job with these events, but being a captive audience, we’re only going to hear their world view. That comes with the territory, but for the audience this portal serves, my analysis is built around a simple question – should you be concerned if we hardly ever heard Cisco say “Unified Communications” at their collaboration summit?
That’s one of the first things that came to mind for me. Cisco seems to know what they’re doing, and it looks like they’ve regained form following some weak quarters earlier this year. Many of the themes we heard - and many of the demos we saw - certainly had strong UC elements, so we’re all speaking the same language – up to a point.
We heard a lot about “people-centric collaboration,” virtualization, and even “unified conferencing,” but not much going by the name of UC. Is this deliberate and is someone missing the boat here? A good question begets better questions, and that’s what I’m trying to do here. Having been to a few of these summits, Cisco is taking its own road, and for them, “collaboration” is the operative word. I would say a great deal of what we would call UC, they would call collaboration, and vice versa.
Sure, this may be splitting hairs over semantics, but Cisco really does come at this space from a different direction. Over the course of two days, you’d never know Cisco is the market leader in IP phones – it just never came up. Instead, we heard about TelePresence systems, WebEx, Cius, Quad, Social Miner and the Jabber SDK. Nobody in this world is picking up a phone and dialing a number.
I certainly don’t think Cisco is missing the UC boat, and yes, it’s deliberate. We all know Cisco prefers winner-take-all with their customers, and of course their collaboration solutions work best when it’s end-to-end Cisco. We got a superb taste of this during our tour of the JW Marriott Marquis hotel. This truly is state-of-the-art consumer collaboration in the hospitality space, and when they make it look this easy, it’s moot whether you call it UC or collaboration. It just works and is a great end user experience.
Peeling the layers back a bit, it becomes easier to understand why they talk about collaboration instead of UC. The latter describes a set of applications, and the former is the outcome. UC enables collaboration, not the other way around. In marketing parlance, Cisco is focusing on the outcome – an activity, a process, a result that can measurably impact performance. For Cisco, this is a higher value focus, and one that speaks to mission-critical work for any business.
Being mission critical, their attention is less on the multitude of endpoints which are often beyond IT’s control, and more on that which they have control – the network. That’s Cisco’s core competence, and that’s what IT invests the most in. As such, endpoint support is important, but secondary to the overall architecture. That’s how Cisco frames the collaboration discussion, and that’s the umbrella under which UC falls.
We heard this pretty clearly from Barry O’Sullivan, as he discussed how all these cool, “people-centric” outcomes can only occur with the right network architecture. He went on to talk about how Cisco’s flexible architecture enables anywhere, any device communication, and is built around four cornerstones – mobile, social, virtual and visual.
All of these cornerstones fit nicely into the UC model, but for most vendors it’s about what this means for the end user. We know that UC has to include mobility now, video is coming up fast, and social media is becoming de rigueur. The fourth cornerstone - virtual - is looming the horizon, and Cisco is betting heavily on the cloud. They’ve seen what Google has done to Microsoft, and they’re not waiting around for the same thing to happen to them.
My main message is that Cisco is after the same result everyone else desires around UC, but via a different approach. Working outward from the network, they believe that the cloud is the best way to address the multitude of end user scenarios that benefit from UC applications. They see a nearly exponential growth coming on a global basis for end users, mobility, broadband-enabled endpoints, video, and of course data running over IP networks. For Cisco, virtualization is the best solution, as it allows for more centralized control, along with economical scale for the kind of growth they’re expecting.
Sure, this is a big-picture view of how enterprise communications is evolving. However, I think it’s valid, and more importantly, sets the tone for how best to enable collaboration – or UC if that’s your comfort zone. Either way, it’s the network that makes everything happen, and if that’s not part of your thinking about UC, you need to step back and broaden your vision.
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