Is the Cisco Cius the Right Tablet for Mobile UC?Is the Cisco Cius the Right Tablet for Mobile UC?

Cisco has decided to "embrace mobility." The real question is: Why should mobility bother to embrace Cisco?

In the first of what we can expect will be many tablet plays by the IP-PBX and UC vendors, Cisco has introduced the Android-based Cius. With their fondness for cutesy two-syllable names the Cius (pronounced "SEE-us"--oh, how creative, how video-centric) might also have been called it the 'Mitu" (pronounced "MEE-too").

Once again it is Apple who is defining the mobile experience and capitalizing on the groundbreaking user interface they pioneered with the iPhone. By comparison, the Cisco Cius appears to have been developed using the "Cons" side of an iPad "Pros and Cons" chart:

* Apple goes "consumer," so Cisco goes "enterprise."

* Apple uses the iPhone OS, so Cisco goes Android.

* In what was probably the tipper for Cisco, the initial iPad lacks a video camera so the Cius can do video--like the next iteration of the iPad won’t have more cameras than a minivan has airbags.

I was not overly impressed with the idea of the tablet concept when the iPad was first announced, but having experienced it first hand, I am now convinced that tablets, at least "well designed" tablets, will be the next major hardware platform for enterprise users. The consumer uptake of the iPad has been monumental, but tablets will insinuate their way into the enterprise in countless ways. Yeah, the health care vertical will be part of that (okay, you've now heard that a thousand and ONE times), but that will be one market among thousands.

The real revolution will be seen as car salesmen, shop foremen, manufacturing supervisors and millions of knowledge workers make tablets their standard limited-input, "around-the-office" computing platform. Anyone who is carrying a laptop or a notebook (the paper kind) will soon be dropping those for a tablet. Video will likely be a minor factor, with utilization comparable to what we see on desktops, but only when the user is stationary (you can’t hold the thing steady when you're walking).

Importantly, the drive for tablets will come out of IT, not telecom; IP-PBX and UC vendors will be well advised to avoid the siren song of branded tablets. Marty Parker got it right in his analysis of the Cius last week when he observed "History suggests that you can get more growth by partnering to leverage others’ successes in their categories than by competing with established category leaders."

Those of us who work in the mobility space find it amusing to see that Cisco has decided to "embrace mobility." The real question is: Why should mobility bother to embrace Cisco?

Cisco's bread and butter is in the wiring closet and the data center, and the mobile line-up has not expanded beyond the same unimaginative voice-over-WLAN handsets and mobile UC clients (i.e. Unified Mobile Communicator) that have languished along with the rest of the PBX-driven mobility initiatives.

Purchase decisions in the mobility area will be driven from the device end, not the PBX. Remaining relevant will require that PBX and UC vendors deliver a compelling user experience in the widest variety of mobile ecosystems. iPhone users will overwhelmingly opt for the iPad to capitalize on their familiarity with the interface, and Android users will undoubtedly go that way for the same reason.

The big question mark will be which direction the "available populations" of RIM, Windows Mobile, and Symbian users take. With virtually no installed base of WebOS users and no application ecosystem, HP will face a major challenge in capitalizing on their acquisition of Palm.

To its credit, Cisco is finally making a move into the mobility space that they largely ignored while pursuing their single-minded strategy of "videophoria," but in the end, the Cius will not be a significant factor (think "Nortel DisplayPhone").

So while Cisco might think they can "expand into mobility," they are about to find out how challenging that can be. Cisco and the other PBX vendors should realize that they are viewing the mobility market like a kid looking at a marvelous new world through a hole in a fence. On the other side of that fence, we can't even see the hole.