Cisco fleshes out strategy for $US34b collaboration market

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 06:40

Business IT - Technology

Last October Cisco flagged its aim, based on its WebEx portfolio to become a major player in the market for enterprise collaboration. This week gave some indication of how it plans to get there, including expanding its collaboration portfolio to include office applications.

Cisco paid $US3.2b for WebEx in September 2007 and added to that portfolio in mid 2007 with the acquistion of PostPath and open protocol Instant Messaging software outfit Jabber in mid 2008 http://www.itwire.com/content/view/20740/53/

Shortly after that it issued a major positioning statement setting out its intent for $US34b collaboration market. Cisco said it had created an 'open collaboration portfolio' which brings together its WebEx, TelePresence and unified communications offerings and a new Web 2.0 platform "designed to integrate with business applications, existing IT infrastructures and other Web services and to allow developers to create customised applications and network-based services."

This $34b figure was based on the UC market ($US27b) plus an estimate of additional revenues available through providing integrated collaboration with UC equipment and services.

At a press conference linking several locations in Asia by telepresence this week, Doug Dennerline, senior vice president and general manager, of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group, said the company was looking for additional acquisitions to flesh out the WebEx portfolio, and had a major push underway to enable its large unified communications partners to play in the collaboration space.

When asked if the company intended to go beyond collaboration tools with WebEx, Dennerline said: "We are looking at lots of assets that could be added to WebEx. When Cisco spent $US250m on PostPath we had 200 companies approach us and we are regularly review the market. We will be thinking long and hard about [additional acquisitions].

Dennerline added: "We have very large unified communications partners from around the world who have built very large practices selling on our UC portfolio, and now telepresence. They are very keen to build WebEx into collaboration practises and to go into large enterprise and say 'let us show you how these collaboration tools can change the way you work, not just inside your enterprise but through the firewall to outside partners.

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