Cisco + HP + Collaboration Review = Confusion and Opportunity

It's been busy 24 hours in Cisco-land, and I wanted to comment on two back-to-back events - one of which I attended in person, and one which just hit the wires this morning (but I had hints about yesterday). Today's news has the biggest impact overall, and I wanted to tie it back to yesterday's Q2 Collaboration Review briefing. This morning, Cisco and HP announced they're going their separate ways. Am sure this is no surprise, and not being that connected to HP, I can't go too deep here. However, HP clearly has reached a breaking point with Cisco's moves into their territory, and much like the personal computer world has boiled down to two basic choices - Mac or PC - it looks like you're either with Cisco or against them. Very interesting implications to consider here, especially if 3Com does end up with HP.

The immediate impact on the world of Unified Communications is probably minimal, but the ecosystem is going to change. By moving away from HP, Cisco will likely need to rely more on its channel partners, and Dimension Data has been cited a few times as a beneficiary here. I've followed them off and on, and as global partners go, they're pretty important to Cisco, and I agree with this conclusion. Conversely, HP will likely work more closely now with Cisco's competitors, and that's where things get more interesting in the UC space. I got a taste of this on Wednesday, when I attended Aastra's open house at their HQ here in Toronto (for a change, it was nice not having to travel somewhere). They updated us on the launch of MX-ONE in Canada, and a key part of their roadmap included how they'll partner with HP ProCurve for a more complete solution. For more detail, I'll steer you to my blog post about their event.

Back to Cisco. Yesterday, I attended their Q2 Collaboration Briefing via telepresence at their Canadian HQ in downtown Toronto. This was a global update, with 22 analysts participating, and I was the only one from Canada. While the overall focus was collaboration, UC was definitely part of the mix. There wasn't much talk, however about all the cool things we saw at their Collaboration Summit last November, but they did provide a few metrics to validate their traction and talked about a few customer deployments as proof points. The tensions with HP did come up, but they didn't tip their hand on the news that came out today.

The most interesting takeaway from yesterday regarding UC was their stated push into hosted services. Just as they've made moves into HP's back yard, they're doing the same with hosted, which could well be an early counter move against Google. More importantly, it could make things more complicated for both channel partners and enterprises. Now they can have Cisco both ways - on prem or hosted. This is part of Cisco's bigger plans to work more strategically with service providers, and BT is the best example of that to date. There's a big, but fairly fragile ecosystem of hosted providers, and I'm sure they're not too happy about this move. Granted, Cisco is best suited for larger enterprises, but they'll definitely be selling down-market, so there will be a lot of smaller operators and UC vendors watching this closely.

Attending their review yesterday has given me a lot to think about, and while Cisco is doing a lot of great things to move collaboration forward, there's also cause for concern in the broader competitive environment, and the HP news just adds another layer to the mix. As with Aastra, I blogged about Cisco as well, and you can read more about that here.

Once you've digested all this, feel free to jump in - there's lots to talk about here!