Cisco fleshes out strategy for $US34b collaboration market

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 06:40

Business IT - Technology

"There is a very large consulting services practices to be built moving these partners from IT sales into services sales and bringing in web 2.0 designers behind them to do that kind of work. There are lots of business opportunities around verticals like health, education and government, and we are working with Cisco teams to put the right practices into those collaboration teams."

In parallel with these initiatives, Dennerline said major enhancements to WebEx were in the pipeline. "I have a lot of development underway that will improve the in-meting experience and before and after meeting experience of WebEx. A very large amount of effort is being pout into the back end, for example to include ecommerce as part of the portfolio. These are all projects that we wil be shipping in less than a year and will make a meaningful impact on the market."

He added: "We feel strongly that as [collaboration] technology moves from early adopters to mainstream some of the capability required will be simple pricing and ease of use so we are doing things to make that happen.

Provision of applications "in the cloud" available on a pay-as-you-go basis is one of four layers in cloud computing, and at the same press conference, Cisco CTO, Padmasree Warrior, said Cisco intended to play in three of these: the SaaS layer with WebEx, Platform computing where the cloud provides here software development frameworks and components offered on a pay as you go basis. "WebEx Connect is an example of this where Cisco is developing the capability to incorporate additional applications into WebEx," Warrior said.

Below this is " Infrastructure as a service" where underlying computing resources - processing and storage - are provided on demand. Cisco does not intend to play in this space, but intends to be a major supplier of the infrastructure to support this and the other three layers, with the announcement of its Cisco Unified Computing Architecture in March.

Cisco announced includes blade servers developed in partnership with Intel and partnerships with other key players: BMC Software, EMC, Emulex, Microsoft, NetApp, Novell, Oracle, QLogic, Red Hat and VMware that in some cases extend well beyond technical integration to provide services and end-to-end support for its new Unified Computing Architecture.