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Cisco's collaboration product launch bonanza
Tuesday, November 17, 2009 by Angela Ashenden
At its Collaboration Summit last week, Cisco reinforced the message that it sees big business in the collaboration market with a flurry of new product and services announcements. Perhaps the most significant from a collaboration perspective is its entry into the SaaS-based email market, with the launch of Cisco WebEx Mail. The service, which is based on the PostPath technology that Cisco acquired just over a year ago, is only available in the US and Canada initially, with European availability not expected for another 12 months or so. Features include a 5GB mailbox (upgradable to 35GB), a choice of browser or mobile clients as well as Outlook and other IMAP client support, and embedded security and antispam through the IronPort technology (another acquisition), with a monthly price tag of $5 per user. With WebEx Mail, Cisco is hoping to challenge Google by positioning itself as a more enterprise-friendly provider of SaaS email, although of course its delay in bringing the service to market (particularly given that it’s not coming to Europe for some time) mean that it now has other “enterprise grade” competition in this area from IBM’s LotusLive iNotes.
Other important announcements from my perspective included two new/enhanced instant messaging offerings - WebEx Connect IM (SaaS) and Unified Presence and Unified Personal Communicator 8.0 (on-premise) – which have both been rebuilt to take advantage of yet another acquisition, the XMPP-based IM and presence technology from Jabber. WebEx Connect IM is an interesting one, as it effectively brings the WebEx Connect platform to market in Europe – to date it has only been available in North America.
And Cisco has finally stuck a stake in the ground for social software – the one major area of collaboration that was missing from its portfolio. The Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an internally developed, social software solution which includes features such as blogs, wikis, document sharing, microblogging, rating and tagging, as well as integration with Unified Presence and WebEx Conferencing. At the moment this is not generally available – it is at alpha stage and being rolled out internally – but while it’s good to see Cisco progressing in this area, the current branding suggests it will be an on-premise product, whereas a SaaS approach would make much more sense. I’m sure we’ll see several more evolutions of this before it hits the market officially, but again, it’s all good progress.
You can read our Capability Summary and Overview of Cisco’s collaboration software offering here. Advisory service clients can read the Full Vendor Assessment here.
For more analysis of collaboration trends and best practices, click here to download free Guest Pass reports, and click here for more on our premium collaboration advisory service.
Posted in Collaboration