Collaborative Thinking

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 3)

The following is Part 3 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Note: Update to remove name of portal vendor until official announcement.

Clarifications & Questions

As the launch event and collaboration summit progress, additional information will be provided. Areas where I have questions and will be looking for clarification include:

Hosted e-Mail

• Specifics on mail migration support (professional services, tools).
• Specifics on hybrid models (some Exchange inboxes are likely to remain on-premises).
• Specific details on how e-Discovery, audit, and compliance needs are addressed.
• Will there be any calendaring migration concerns (not explicitly mentioned)?
• Cisco needs to compare/contrast its approach with Microsoft’s BPOS – not just e-mail but overall to equate synergies from other WebEx Collaboration Cloud services.
• Is there a Notes/Domino compete opportunity too?

Show And Share

• How are storage and records management requirements satisfied?
• Are there any network management concerns?
• There will likely raise privacy issues – what are the EU implications for instance? Is there an opt-out or consent (opt-in) capability?
• ISSupport for record/playback conferencing systems?

Enterprise Collaboration Platform

• What are the specifics of portal deal?
• Does the deal include all capabilities of the portal vendor's software?
• Will the portal be available for both on-premises and SaaS? Will functional parity be attained between SaaS and on-premises?
• Is there Wave support (federation)?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the portal market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the content management market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle as well best-of-breed vendors like EMC? Will there be a partnership coming with EMC given the virtual computing environment partnership?
• Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the search market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle?
• Does Cisco believe it is competing in the Enterprise 2.0 market with Microsoft, IBM, Jive, and others (Telligent, Socialtext, Atlassian…)?
• Where is the application development story given the SOA, Rest and other interfaces for collaborative applications? Given the portal is open source – how will Cisco interact with that community?
• Where is the social media play? What is the touch point between ECP and EOS?

Pulse

• Do organizations want this at the network layer vs. other alternatives that are based on activity streams?
• How does Pulse honor permission models (authentication, authorization and access controls)?
• Are there privacy (EU, labor unions, worker councils) concerns with Pulse? Is there a model that supports opt-in consent?

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part 2)

The following is Part 2 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

Note: Update to remove name of portal vendor until official announcement.

What is Cisco announcing?

To understand and decipher what Cisco is announcing, it is important to break the information down into four distinct areas: Strategic Pillars, Reference Architecture, “Extend Current”, and “Enter New”.

Strategic Pillars

• Interoperable, Open Architecture: Given the strategic focus on inter-company collaboration, Cisco plans to leverage open source, open protocols, and modernized methods of interoperability (e.g., SOA, Rest) to enable any device or application to leverage a consistent set of core of collaborative services.
• Flexible deployment models: Cisco intended to offer application and infrastructure services for different computing models including SaaS/Cloud and on-premises, or hybrid combinations of both.
• Enterprise social software: Cisco plans to deliver the type of social tools and applications popular in the consumer world, but with the necessary foundation expected from enterprise organizations (e.g., security, availability, quality of service, and reliability).
• Video communications: As stated earlier, conversations and visual communication are now viewed as collaboration from a business perspective, rather than the tooling viewpoint so long adopted by IT. Cisco believes that communication-centric and people-centric interaction models are the basis for next generation collaboration platforms and solutions.
• Secure inter-company: Boundary-less computing that allows internal and external collaboration across employees, partners, suppliers, and customers. Externalization trends are resulting in companies needed to collaborate as easily externally as they do today internally.

Reference Architecture

• Infrastructure: At the lowest level, the Virtual Computing Environment effort would be leveraged here (compute, storage, and network).
• Collaboration Services: In the middle layer, Cisco’s assets related to presence, location, unified communications, collaboration, and content management are situated at this tier of Cisco’s model.
• Communication & Collaboration Applications: conferencing, blogs, wikis, customer care, e-mail, telepresence and other people-facing applications are at the highest level.

“Extend Current”: Upgrades To Existing Assets

• Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage: One-button start of a combined and integrated Telepresence and WebEx meeting (improved user experience, productivity).
• Video-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phone 8900 and 9900 Series with Cisco Unified Communications Manager
• Cisco Intercompany Media Engine (IME): simplifies high-definition audio and video across organizations (common user experience internally or externally)
• Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory: opt-in directory for companies to list endpoints, rooms, etc.
• Cisco WebEx Connect IM: The product moves from AIM to an XMPP-based IM network based on the Jabber. WebEx Connect C6.0 begins with federation across all XMPP based clients and the AIM network and will federate across other networks such as IBM SameTime, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Yahoo!. Integration with Cisco Unified Communications and WebEx Meeting Manager. There are additional policy management capabilities as well.
• Cisco Unified Presence and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 8.0: Combines presence from SIP/SIMPLE, SIP (PBX phones), and XMPP sources. Federate and exchange messages with clients like Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Sametime, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Cisco WebEx Connect, and GoogleTalk. Support for server-side IM logging. B2B federation support (native for XMPP, via third-party products for non-XMPP Public IM. Presence interfaces for application enablement as well.
• Any-to-any Cisco TelePresence HD interoperability with Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition

“Extend New”: New Entrants

• Cisco Show and Share: Digital Media System 5.2 introduces an updated Desktop Video portal (Show and Share) – a social collaboration platform that mimics YouTube that includes many collaborative functions (e.g., commenting, polling, ratings, tagging, user-generated authoring and publishing, usage reporting, multi-language support, content subscription, advanced search, and TelePresence playback). Speech-to-text transcription allows intelligent viewing experiences (skim for relevant points in the video).
• Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP) is based on open source components (search, semantic web), standard interfaces ( Java and document APIs), intellectual property added by Cisco, and a leading open source portal that includes social tools and applications. It includes a wide variety of features such as a personal dashboard, social & networking-based auto-tagging, click to call/meet/IM, people and communities, information search, content management, a directory profile, social graph, blogs, wikis, forums, teamspaces, video support, a UC-enabled browser as well as micro-blogging and activity streams. Search is also included (search faceting, rating, semantic search, time-based search results, related content, user-defined notifications).
• SaaS e-mail: Corporate-grade hosted email, native support of Outlook; up to 25G mailboxes, high availability and mobile support for all users, Web 2.0 client, delivered by WebEx Collaboration Cloud with IronPort; US and Canada
• Cisco Pulse: Pulse is a search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization. Pulse helps people locate and connect with the best available experts and information. State-of-the-art search and deep-packet analysis enables automated tagging of content and media in real-time (any content in motion across the network, including video and audio). Pulse integrates with Cisco collaboration solutions (TelePresence, WebEx), as well as with other social applications and custom mashups.
• Cisco Media Experience Engine (MXE) 5600/3500 (Real time media transformation, including speech to text, HD Interoperability with Cisco TelePresence)
• Cisco ISR G2: Medianet-ready router, optimizes video performance in the branch

Understanding Cisco's Collaboration Strategy (Part1)

The following is Part 1 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco.

What is driving Cisco into the collaboration market?

There are many reasons driving Cisco in this direction (revenue opportunities, growth needs, and customer demand). Cisco believes that the collaboration market is in transition – that there are structural changes in the market that opens the door for Cisco to leverage its assets (voice, video, and networking) in ways that will enable it to take a leadership position. This should come as no surprise to market followers or competitors – Cisco is a company that strongly believes that its ability to grow and innovate is dependent on how well it:

· Understands the emergence and evolution of market shifts and the repercussions of those shifts to Cisco (pro and con)

· Formulates strategies, adjusts its own business model(s), and arrays resources to capitalize on market opportunities created by those shifts

· Continuously listens to customers and other stakeholders along the way

· Restructures its organization and channels to best leverage its relationship capital in ways that establishes market leadership

· Iterates and executes on those strategies in a manner that times Cisco’s entry and growth into those market adjacencies

What major changes in the collaboration market is Cisco exploiting?

Cisco is exploiting three “wedge issues” as it moves into the collaboration market:

· Virtual Computing Environment: The deal with EMC and VMware enables Cisco to catch-up to a transition that matured more rapidly perhaps than Cisco expected. Market expectations and competitive needs combined to make a partnership necessary. Cisco can leverage this alliance as it attempts to influence/control its role and infrastructure solutions in the SaaS/Cloud market.

· Video Networks: It should come as no surprise that Cisco fixates on video. However, it is a lever that Cisco can exploit given consumer trends (YouTube) and social computing trends where conversations and visual communication are now viewed not from a tooling viewpoint but as “acts of collaboration” at the people and process level. Capitalizing on video trends keeps Cisco on a necessary business trajectory. Video is a competency Cisco can claim as its unique heritage compared to Microsoft and IBM as well.

· Collaboration: Converging UC (voice, conferencing) and collaboration trends make this a crucial market adjacency for Cisco to enter. In some ways, it had no choice. Cisco could not allow a key rival (Microsoft) to encroach in the UC market without a response. So on the one hand, its move into collaboration is defensive to protect its UC assets. However, more importantly, given the structural shifts within the collaboration market – it is very opportunistic for Cisco to move into collaboration regardless of Microsoft. The move into collaboration is enables Cisco to transform its voice and video communications solutions into broader solutions and adjust its business model to deliver additional solutions specific to collaboration.

Summary

Cisco sees value in a network-centric approach that will unify collaboration activities across multiple silos. It's embedded capabilities in the network enable it to perform unique services such as auto tagging all forms of media. As collaboration moves in the direction Cisco believes will happen, the sharing of knowledge transitions from a text centric model to include voice and video (on-demand, Podcasts, etc) where it (Cisco) brings unique value relative to other approaches.

The combinatorial opportunity arising from these wedge issues enable Cisco to target SaaS-based email to gain short-term customer traction and establish longer-term market credibility as a collaboration platform and solution provider. Simultaneously, Cisco hopes to build momentum (via WebEx Collaboration Cloud and Enterprise Collaboration Platform), to solidify its collaboration story. Its new portfolio component, enterprise social software, positions Cisco more broadly across multiple market segments associated with collaboration (content management, search, and portal). Overall, becoming the market leader for inter-company collaboration appears to be the primary focal point for Cisco. However, it will end up competing head-on with traditional collaboration vendors (i.e., IBM, Microsoft) as well as up-and-coming new entrants (e.g., Jive).

Cisco Broadens Foray Into Collaboration Market

Highlights of Cisco's press release is below (with a link to the full release). Additional blog posts will come out later today (starting around noon PT) that will include my early thoughts. I would recommend attending the virtual launch event (webcast).

ANNOUNCEMENT DETAILS

New telepresence and unified communications solutions deliver rich business-to-business communications across organizational boundaries

• Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between  the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges.
• Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage is a simple, one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing. Cisco TelePresence WebEx Engage, combines the ease-of-use and broad reach of Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Meeting Center
• The Cisco Intercompany Media Engine gives end-users business-to-business communications over any IP network, maximizing network efficiency and reducing costs. This new solution, submitted today to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization, includes features such as business-to-business wide band audio, voice and other collaboration capabilities, including video, with multiple levels of built-in security, and will add additional capabilities in the future. Service providers will benefit from the ability to offer new business-to-business communications services, differentiated network capabilities, and expanded managed services.
• With Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0, Cisco extends support for a wide range of endpoints including new video- and WiFi-enabled Cisco Unified IP Phones and additional smartphones via Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. Cisco UC 8.0 also offers customers a choice of deployment models – whether on-premise, on-demand, or hybrid.
• Further details about today's Unified Communications 8.0 news are available here.

Mail, messaging and presence tools

• Cisco WebEx^TM Mail is a new corporate-grade, hosted email solution from Cisco with native Microsoft Outlook interoperability, optimized mobile device support, and browser-independent AJAX web 2.0 access. Using technology acquired from PostPath, Cisco WebEx Mail has a highly scalable infrastructure that overcomes the limitations of traditional mailbox size. Cisco WebEx Mail is on-demand, highly available, and designed to free IT departments from the burden of email infrastructure management and operation.
• Using technology gained through the acquisition of Jabber, Cisco today announced it has integrated the XMPP standard to provide secure, federated presence across its collaboration portfolio, starting with Cisco WebEx Connect Instant Messaging and Cisco Unified Presence 8.0. This announcement showcases Cisco's commitment to deliver standards-based solutions to drive greater interoperability across clients, devices and applications. The XMPP open standard allows presence federation among presence systems, both business and consumer, as well as support for third party enterprise instant messaging clients and applications.

Cisco breaks new ground with enterprise social software offerings

Cisco is introducing enterprise-ready social software solutions that allow customers to dynamically form teams and communities in a highly secure manner. Cisco's technology helps enable teams to be formed based on expertise and relevance, regardless of location, and brings experts together with both asynchronous tools and real-time voice and video.

• Cisco Show and Share is a social video system that helps organizations create and manage highly secure video communities to share ideas and expertise, optimize global video collaboration, and personalize the connection between customers, employees, and students, with user-generated content. It allows organizations to record, edit and share video with comments, ratings, tagging and RSS feeds, and speech-to-text transcripts can be uploaded for easy video search and viewing.
• Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an enterprise-class social software portal that features a corporate directory with social networking capabilities. It allows users to create team spaces and community environments 'on the fly' and also offers a customizable framework for integration of legacy business applications and web 2.0 content. Unlike today's document-centric portals, the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is people-centric, facilitating real-time voice and video communication to connect people, communities, and information to make faster business decisions.

Cisco offers customers new medianet-ready devices that optimize networks for video, voice and collaboration

Cisco introduced three new, network-based devices that help customers evolve their IP networks to medianets.  In combination with the recently introduced Cisco Integrated Services Routers Generation 2, customers can now enrich their existing collaboration capabilities with new, network-based functionality.

• From the Cisco Media Processing family, the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3500 and the Cisco Media Experience Engine 5600 provide real-time video transcoding, allowing any content to be shared across the network to any end-point device.  Innovative features such as speech-to-text transcription of videos will help enable video on the network to become as searchable and accessible as text and web pages today.  The MXE 5600 also facilitates standards-based interoperability across many video endpoints, allowing for Cisco TelePresence to interoperate with video conferencing devices from other companies.
• Cisco Pulse is an innovative search platform that performs dynamic tagging of content as it traverses the network, offering a real-time, cross application view of the entire organization.  This intelligence allows people to accurately locate and rapidly connect with the best available experts and information they need.

Cisco Breaks Down Barriers to Business-to-Business Collaboration -> Cisco News