Enterprise Connect: Cisco and Google Team upEnterprise Connect: Cisco and Google Team up

In his Tuesday keynote, Collaboration GM Rowan Trollope showed off cool new video gear and an important new alliance.

When you're in a tough fight, it helps to have big, powerful friends join up with you. Cisco is in a tough fight with Microsoft for dominance in the enterprise collaboration space, and today Cisco's Senior VP and GM for collaboration, Rowan Trollope, brought a powerful friend to the Enterprise Connect keynote stage: Google.

As part of a keynote that included the demonstration of some impressive new video products, Trollope also announced that Cisco has forged an alliance with Google to work together to bring Google Apps to Cisco products, and to embed Cisco WebEx natively in Google Chrome browsers. Even as he pledged fealty to the emerging WebRTC multimedia-browser standard, Trollope essentially stole a march on the new standard with the native-WebEx-Chrome integration.

Trollope's speech was short on details regarding the Google Apps integration, but it's clearly an attempt to respond to the growing success of Microsoft Lync. Google Apps is the only real office productivity suite that could credibly pose any degree of challenge to Microsoft Office--Google executive Rajen Sheth, who joined Rowan Trollope on the Enterprise Connect keynote stage, claimed 5 million users for Apps--which admittedly is still a tiny fraction of the number of Microsoft Office users, which the vendor has claimed at 1 billion worldwide.

But before he got to the Google announcement, Trollope did a kind of Steve Jobs homage, introducing a series of products whose ease of use and design sensibility he emphasized.

Not only did Trollope dispense with the keynoter's best friend, the demo-guy sidekick, he did a bit of stagecraft by opening a box containing the company's just-announced SX10 conferencing product, which he described as "do-it-yourself-telepresence," both for its ease of use and its $1,500 price tag. He plugged power over Ethernet and HDMI cables from the unit into an HD monitor and with that, fired up a videoconference with a remote team of three. Scorning the idea of a traditional remote control--"remote controls pretty much suck," he said--he instead called up an app on his iPad and used this as the remote to start up the conference.

The iPad synched automatically with the SX10 unit, though Trollope puckishly declined to say exactly how: "This is like magic," he said. "How do we do it? I'm not going to tell you."

Then he moved on to demo Cisco's new MX700 two-screen unit, which he described in the kind of detail you're used to hearing from Apple keynotes, alluding to the "craftsmanship" and "love that we put into building this thing." He praised the unit's "Scandinavian design and Californian approachability."

He also touted its functionality, the highlight being a two-camera setup which uses speaker tracking and facial detection to automatically frame the people in the conference, cropping out all the dead space in the conference room that in traditional conferences leaves the actual participants occupying a small portion of the screen, their faces appearing almost too small to bother with video, as Trollope put it.

In addition to framing the participants, the camera system zooms in on the active speaker, then goes back to group framing when the person at the other end of the conference is speaking. Again, Trollope would only allude to a "secret sauce" that enables this function.

All in all, this was a very different kind of Enterprise Connect keynote, one that set a new tone from Cisco. To the extent that room video drives enterprise communications in the next generation, it was a powerful demonstration. To the extent that allying with Google means obtaining the best possible partner in staving off Microsoft, it was a significant announcement. Microsoft's control of the enterprise desktop means Lync still has a powerful engine to drive its growth. But Cisco clearly doesn't intend for the challenge to go unanswered.

Yet Trollope closed his keynote on almost a conciliatory note. Despite earlier taking digs at Windows Phone and other Microsoft products, Trollope asserted that, while competing is great, the enterprise collaboration industry can expect "tremendous growth, and "there's a lot more pie out there for everyone."

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