Cisco Collaboration Vision: New Launch Enhances Market PositionCisco Collaboration Vision: New Launch Enhances Market Position

Few companies have the strategic vision or resources (human and financial) to execute a product/service launch on the scale Cisco has just executed.

Cisco Systems earlier today announced numerous product offers and solutions in support of its collaboration vision that span across several functional areas:

* Conferencing
* Customer care
* Enterprise social software
* IP communications
* Messaging
* Mobile applications
* Telepresence

The following diagram illustrates the Cisco Collaboration Architecture concept, including the foundation on which the above communication application functions reside:

Many of the launch offerings were designed and developed to enhance pre-existing Cisco Collaboration Solutions, such as Unified Communications Manager (UCM) and WebEx, but a few take the company in new directions, such as hosted email and enterprise social networking.

Elements of Cisco Collaboration Strategy
Before discussing details of the launch it may be beneficial to provide a framework to better evaluate the role each new product/service brings to the Cisco Collaborations Solution portfolio. Cisco has identified five key elements for its collaboration strategy:

1. The belief that collaboration is moving from text and document-centric, to communications and people centric. Central to this belief is the role of video as a transformative element that will become as easy to use as documents are today in terms of creation, publishing, and repurpose. Cisco also believes that the current IP communications network is not sufficient to support the video needs of tomorrow.

2. Cisco Medianet, an intelligent network optimized for rich media, will enable the pervasive and scalable use of video.

3. Medianet will enable a more personal, interactive and social experience by making the technology media aware, endpoint aware and network aware.

4. The network will be used to format video and all media to best match the characteristics and the limitations of a user’s specific situation.

5. Medianet goes beyond quality of service to focus on quality of experience

Cisco announced its "medianet" strategy and concept late last year. It included a new suite of technologies designed for advanced communications, collaboration and entertainment through video and rich media-optimized service provider, business and home networks. The need for a medianet is driven by Cisco’s belief that video and rich media will represent 90% of total network traffic. Several of today’s announcements are highly or partially focused on video, including new IP phone, telepresence, and social networking offers. Cisco's recent Tandberg acquisition announcement further underscored the company’s evolving strategic focus on a communications medium that demands higher bandwidth and more applications-focused networks.

All of the Cisco Collaboration Solutions offers contribute towards achieving a set of objectives: Build trust and accelerate decisions with rich, real-time Interactions; connect the right people with the right information; accelerate team performance; collaborate with confidence across companies; and optimize IT investments. In this context, according to John Chambers, CEO, Cisco, "collaboration will affect every industry. It will change service, sales, and business models. It will change the size, scope, and number of projects a company can take on. And it will change the speed of implementation." According to Cisco, companies that create a culture of collaboration will move ideas instead of people, reduce travel without sacrificing personal connections, improve decision making speed, work in environmentally sustainable ways, and increase productivity on a global scale.

What I particularly like about the Cisco launch is that the overused term Unified Communications (UC) is not used to describe or categorize any one product or service. It's a given that virtually all offers from the same designer and developer should be "unified" in the sense of connectivity and/or interoperability, and several new Cisco offers also help "unify" communications and collaboration solutions across multi-vendor networks and endpoints. Collaboration has a greater sense of meaning to customers that UC does not, an important marketing objective most purveyors of so-called UC solutions sometimes forget. "Communications and collaboration" is a cleaner and more descriptive term of what customers need and want to do. Unify is a more technical term that individual system subscribers care little about when performing everyday work tasks. A subscriber is more apt to say he/she requires communications or collaboration with other subscribers, but few (if any) would ever say they need to "unify."

Cisco Strategic Direction for Collaboration
The Cisco strategic direction for collaboration has the following key elements as illustrated in the following chart:

Underlying Cisco's strategic direction, according to the company, is the belief that collaboration has been moving from text and document-centric to communications and people centric. In today's environment where meeting participants are likely to be dispersed across many locations, video is the optimal way to communicate, if a medianet is available to support the technical requirements. Video as a transformative element, as cited previously, is central to the communications and collaboration experience, as is the role of a medianet. Videoconferencing in the past has been used selectively and sparingly, mainly due to infrastructure/services costs, difficulty implementing and managing, and lack of integration with other communications and collaboration processes, but today's video market is characterized by rapidly declining costs, easier to use and manage systems, and interoperability with other communications/collaboration tools.

The rapid growth of social networking is also quickly changing how individuals interact, Cisco observes. In the world of business, social networking can tear down the barriers and rigidly structured silos that traditionally isolated individuals from each other to give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities. More projects will be performed by "clusters of experts" and these groups can be formed dynamically to achieve a shared outcome, according to the company. The self-organizing cycle will continually repeat itself as needed. It is a more efficient and agile process to produce faster results, since experts are drawn to projects rather than assigned top down. Experts will be identified by tagging their network activities, e.g. applications enabled or websites visited. Cisco envisions Enterprise Social Software as the means to enable this type of new work environment. Although social networking in the consumer world has become the fourth most popular online activity, even passing personal email, it has evolved very slowly in the business world. Cisco has identified four key requirements to increase acceptance in the business world: security, availability, quality of service, and reliability. In time, social networking will dramatically change the way business people work and interact.

As collaboration extends beyond an individual enterprise's firewalls to include individuals across other organizations, be it partners, suppliers, or customers, inter-company collaboration will demand a new level of cross-firewall security comparable to that behind any one company firewall, according to Cisco. A few vertical market sectors, such as manufacturing and retail, have been influential in the development of secure inter-company communications and collaboration, because of the nature of business today.

For example, many manufacturers today have become assemblers, outsourcing elements of the manufacturing process to other companies, and therefore they need to operate seamlessly across corporate boundaries and firewalls without security concerns. The same holds true for large brick and mortar retailers, such as Wal-Mart, and online retailers, such as Amazon, who increasingly depend on their suppliers for a variety of operations, such as warehousing and shipping, for which the retailer previously had primary responsibility. For example, a Wal-Mart or Amazon may be the direct contact point for customers, but efficient order fulfillment is highly dependent on communications and collaboration with their suppliers. The necessity for a seamless supply chain management process across companies requires a high level of security.

Flexible deployment models are required based on individual company objectives, their IT resources and priorities. Enterprise solutions and Cloud-based services will each play integral roles in enabling a comprehensive collaboration platform--especially inter-company collaboration. Cisco's vision at the infrastructure layer is to blend the best of both worlds to offer the robustness, security and performance of the enterprise network with the openness and flexibility of a Cloud service, such as Cisco WebEx. Customers should not have to choose one platform or the other, and most today have been looking toward deploying a mix.

A top priority for Cisco is to support an interoperable, open architecture. Cisco points out that individuals inside an organization, their outside partners and customers operate in different workspaces, with different applications, on different devices and operating systems. Without broad and deep interoperability, inter-company collaboration is difficult to achieve, if not impossible.

Announcements

One must immediately take notice of the range and depth of the launch, spanning across each of the seven Cisco Collaboration Solution categories. It is an impressive array of new products and services that further enhances Cisco's position in the communications and collaboration market space. The following are brief descriptions of the key new offers.

Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage (Available 1H2010)
This product combines Cisco TelePresence with Cisco WebEx Meeting Center into a single collaborative solution. With this offer, users can attend meetings using Cisco's two distinct, but now complementary, collaboration solutions, with an improved user experience and greater productivity. It offers simple scheduling and “one button to push” meeting starts using a Cisco Unified IP telephone instrument. Cisco TelePresence video appears in the WebEx interface, and content is shared automatically in both Cisco TelePresence rooms and on WebEx. The meeting can also include distributed participants in non-video mode, i.e. audio, only.

Cisco Unified IP Phone 9900 and 8900 Series (Available 1H2010)
The newest generation of Cisco Unified IP phones includes some enhanced design attributes and a few new features and functions. The look of the new generation of Cisco Unified IP Phones is also different than the first generation 7900 Series.

The new models have integrated high-resolution (640 x 480 VGA quality) color displays capable of 30 frames per second CIF or 24 frames per second VGA and premier audio with high fidelity voice. USB ports for peripheral accessories are included and there is a "deep sleep" option to reduce energy requirements. Another Green Initiative is the use of recyclable plastic molding. The 9900 Series also feature support for interactive, multi-party H.264 video using a built-in Cisco Unified Video camera, a Bluetooth interface to increase station user mobility, and built-in Wi-Fi for instrument portability.

The video elements are part of a major Cisco theme for enhancing the collaboration experience. There are also a variety of modular handsets to suit the tastes of individual station users. The 8900/9900 Series will work with Unified Communications Manager (UCM) or UCM Business Edition (BE) Software Edition 7.1(3) or later. The Cisco Unified 9971 IP Phone is shown below:

The next three offers are designed to support security and policy for business-to-business collaboration across firewalls in any medium, including: email, IM, WebEx, UC, and telepresence.

Cisco Intercompany Media Engine (Available 1H2010)
Intercompany Media Engine is designed to support secure enterprise video telephony and high fidelity wideband audio across company network domains. It also enables secure, efficient network utilization with reduced costs through the deployment of SIP trunk services. Calls between systems can automatically be shifted from between PSTN and SIP trunks with multiple levels of security and spam blocking. It will be self-learning to ease use and administration.

Cisco Unified Presence 8.0 (Available H2010)
Unified Presence 8.0 is a dual protocol, standards-based, and extensible platform that tightly integrates presence and enterprise IM (EIM) with Cisco UC telephony, mobility, and contact center solutions. It also provides the foundation for presence-enabled collaboration including and beyond IM. The presence engine supports Native SIP/SIMPLE and Jabber XMPP and enhanced network-based presence. It is a standards compliant platform that is policy-based, supporting federation for business-to-business EIM and consumer presence IM, and can presence-enabled business process with open APIs.

Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory (Available H2010)
The intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of Cisco TelePresence endpoints, organizations and people that includes a virtual assistant to recommend how video meetings should be scheduled. It is useful for answering the question "who can I call via Cisco TelePresence?" As of Oct 12, 2009, 1,150 rooms across 75 customers were connected to Cisco TelePresence exchanges.
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The next group of new offers is designed to maximize customer investments in existing Cisco products. They are Interoperable at all layers: client, device and application.

Cisco TelePresence HD Interoperability with Media Experience Engine 5600 (Available H2010)
HD videoconferencing interoperability is now supported between Cisco TelePresence and a new Cisco platform, the Media Experience Engine 5600. The MXE 5600 addresses the limitations of traditional video transcoders while offering customers an automated procedure to produce and author content with studio quality results. It is a Cisco end-to-end network-based solution with 720p full screen CTS experience and provides support for other video-enabled devices and any-to-any stored media processing. Benefits of the offer are simplified management for videoconferencing interoperability, leveraging of existing HD VC investments, and future-proofing for other video any-to-any capabilities. The key components of the MXE are shown below:

Cisco WebEx Connect 6.0 (Available Now)
Cisco launched Web Connect last year to much acclaim. New enhancements include the following: Cisco WebEx Connect IM & presence powered by Jabber; Cisco UC integration enabling Cisco IP communications capabilities natively; enhanced WebEx Meeting integration; enhanced policy management; and availability with or without team spaces. Enhancement benefits include improved end user productivity through a single unified client delivering presence, EIM, UC capabilities with minimal overhead; the ability to find and collaborate with associates inside or outside an organization; and centralized provisioning and simplified management of all enterprise users, groups, or individuals through a single console.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0 Session Management Edition (Available Now)
Cisco Unified Communications Manager 8.0 Session Management Edition appears to be the Cisco response to the Avaya Aura Session Manager as regards networking. The new Cisco offer will support interconnections among IP telephony systems using SIP trunk services across a single customer network or multiple customer networks utilizing least cost routing and toll bypass techniques. It will also be used for connections to wireline carriers and wireless operators (for mobile applications). Interconnections among PBXs will also be used in support of social networking and web applications.

Cisco UC Integrations for WebEx Connect and Microsoft Office Communicator (Available Now)
This offer is rather self-explanatory. Station users can access the services and features of Cisco Unified Communications (e.g. softphone, visual voicemail, desktop video, etc.) from both WebEx Connect and Microsoft Office Communicator desktop clients. The following diagram illustrates the screenshots

Cisco Mobile Enhancements (Available Now)
Cisco Mobile enhancements, which include Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator application for the iPhone, Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator 7.0 for BlackBerry, which includes dial via office and an enhanced user experience, and Nokia Call Connect 2.0 for Cisco, offer some significant new capabilities such as having active calls move seamlessly between cellular and WiFi networks. Some new capabilities help companies control their mobile phone costs and increase employee productivity, such as a Dial via Office feature to reduce cellular long distance changes, and new alerts for office voicemail messages and missed calls to Cisco Unified IP phones. The Nokia Call Connect 2.0 for Cisco automatically moves calls between the WLAN and cellular network without disruption, supports mid-call features and allows users to place VoWLAN calls from within other mobile applications, including Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator.

Customer Care
There are a variety of customer care products and services that range from a totally new SaaS offer to enhancements of existing solutions. The new Cisco and salesforce.com Customer Interaction Cloud is a multi-channel contact center solution that is designed for organizations with 30 to 300 representatives or agents. This solution allows customers to use the salesforce.com Service Cloud as their primary agent desktop while having full Cisco Unified Contact Center capabilities to operate a customer care or support center, as well as inbound and outbound telesales, from anywhere in North America. It features pre-integrated Cisco Unified Contact Center with salesforce.com's Service Cloud and agent desktop, along with standard configurations so self-service administration is easier to manage, and agents are immediately more productive.

Cisco Unified Expert Advisor empowers subject matter experts anywhere in the organization to assist with incoming customer calls. The new Release 8.0 version provides integration with the Unified Diagnostics Portal for improved call tracing and alarming; it also supports virtualization via VMWare, and adds XMPP support for integration enablement with additional Instant Messaging clients. Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise Release 8.0 features improvements in the areas of compatibility, lower total cost of ownership, and feature enhancements. Release highlights include: call type to skill group reporting, agent self re-skilling, increased scalability for Cisco Outbound option and easier install and setup configuration. Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Release 8.0 is the first release of the product as an appliance, a move that aims to reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), simplify installation and upgrades and improve resiliency. Additional enhancements include: high-availability over WAN for enhanced redundancy and disaster recovery, improved diagnostics through support for Diagnostics Portal, and support for the new Cisco IP 89xx phones.

Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal Release 8.0 includes a Courtesy Callback feature, supports VMWare to enable more deployment options on fewer boxes, and provides enhanced manageability through integration with Unified Diagnostics Portal. The Cisco Unified Intelligence Center, providing integrated reporting for Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Hosted and Unified ICM is built on a robust extensible Web 2.0 framework that is customizable and flexible. The new Release 8.0 version now comes standard as part of an integrated offering with Cisco’s Unified CCE, CCH and ICM offers. In addition, it supports cluster deployment for resiliency and fail-over and is localized for 17 languages.

Enterprise Social Software

Several newly launched offers signal Cisco entry into the enterprise social software market with new solutions designed to accelerate team performance by bringing experts together as they are needed with applications, social tools and pervasive collaboration tools. They include Cisco Show and Share (a social video system) and Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform.

Cisco Show and Share (available December 2009) supports: Video collaboration and sharing; user generated content & social media features; live events and TelePresence playback; and secure business workflows and reporting. It is a video-everywhere approach that enhances communications and collaboration, allowing individuals to have more personal contact with others for such business uses as virtual training and new product launches.

Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (Limited Availability) is a premises-based software solution that enables teams and knowledge workers to quickly and securely create, share, and scale content and expertise within an organization. It helps connecting people, communities and information to get work done faster; form teams, find experts, and enable instant collaboration; and provides a consolidated view of materials for fast and easy access to contextual and relevant expertise and information.

Cisco WebEx Mail (Available Now)
Cisco WebEx Mail is a new Cisco-hosted corporate-grade email service initially available in the US and Canada and delivered through the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud with IronPort. The service includes native support of Microsoft Outlook, a Web 2.0 client, ActiveSyn mobile clients, and AJAX. Personal mailboxes will support up to 35 Gbytes storage. Blackberry support and on-premise/cloud calendar and archive service. Support for Blackberry devices and an on-premise/Cloud calendar and archive service is planned for later in the year. This offer further enhances Cisco’s position as the leading provider of SaaS solutions among the enterprise communications system suppliers.

What it All Means

The Cisco Collaboration Solution launch is not focused on one functional area, but spans across seven areas. It is not limited to a few new and/or enhanced offers, but about two dozen. Few companies have the strategic vision or resources (human and financial) to execute a product/service launch on the scale Cisco has just executed, and I doubt that any of Cisco’s competitors in the enterprise communications market space could be included in the select group. When one considers many of the other recent launches or those in the planning stage that Cisco has executed for its widening range of products and solutions, and to take into account other corporate activities, e.g. such multibillion dollar deals as Tandberg and Starent, it is difficult to imagine the degree of management planning and team work required to pull everything off without disastrous results.

When Cisco enters a market it does not do it lightly, because the objective is to quickly attain a leadership position at the expense of the incumbents. Cisco’s success in the enterprise communications market was unprecedented, because it toppled long time market leaders from their perches and played a major factor in the realignment of more than a few sizable global competitors, such as Nortel, Siemens, and Ericsson.

Collaboration products and services builds on IP communications. Cisco had the advantage of entering the market during a paradigm shift from circuit switched to packet switched platforms, a technology for which it had very strong experience and resources. Cisco helped accelerate the market for IP telephony at a time many of the traditional PBX competitors appeared to be taking things slowly, because they had large installed bases to protect. Without an installed base to worry about, Cisco moved full steam ahead.

Cisco intends to be the first name in collaboration and there are few competitors who could pose a strong challenge. Microsoft is the first one that comes to mind, because of its dominating desktop software position. Avaya, following the acquisition of Nortel, will have the largest installed customer base (approximately 100 million global station users) as a leveraging point, but can they match the breadth of Cisco’s offerings or its corporate resources? Throwing into the mix Cisco’s dominating position as an IT infrastructure supplier further strengthens the supplier's market position. It is not difficult to match Cisco in several of the seven functional categories as defined above, but can any other competitor effectively compete across the entire board?

Customer and competitor reactions to the Cisco launch are sure to arrive quickly; the media will report it in an untold number of articles; and bloggers will most certainly analyze and dissect it from every angle. As an interested industry observer and commentator I will also begin preparing for the next major competitor launch in reaction to the Cisco launch, because the dynamic nature of the market demands that we look forward (though occasional glimpses at the past are more than helpful in predicting what’s to come).

Avaya hinted at a few things in its pipeline during last week’s VoiceCon keynote address by Dr. Alan Baratz, especially something new for the user desktop experience (I’m guessing a Spring 2010 launch date). Another VoiceCon keynote address by Siemens introduced the supplier’s initial foray into social networking (a Twitter subportal embedded in an OpenScape client screen), the first of more offers to come. Siemens’ Mark Straton also restated the supplier’s strategy for utilizing Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) platform to deploy hosted Communications as a Service (Caas) offers. And let’s not forget about the next major release of OCS 2007 from Microsoft when the preeminent software developer takes the platform’s telephony capabilities to a much higher level. All are interesting things to look forward to in the coming year.