Microsoft, Cisco and competitive collaboration

Stuart Corner
Friday, 16 March 2007 09:04

Opinion and Analysis

Cisco has just announced that it will shell out $US3.2b for collaborations technology specialist WebEx.  That is pretty big bikkies even for the serially acquisitive Cisco, but it's not hard to see why Cisco needs what WebEx has to offer.

Cisco faces an every growing threat to its enterprise communications business from the Giant of Redmond: Microsoft.

Traditional telephony systems makers like Avaya and Nortel have evolved into today's enterprise communications market from making key systems and PABXes: the backbone of business telephone systems for more than half a century. Data networking equipment vendors like Cisco have come at it from different direction and now these three and a handful of others dominate the market for IP based telephony systems. They are leveraging their strength in this market into the new markets of unified communications and collaboration.

Today the office telephone is just one of many enterprise communication tools: there is email, voicemail, instant messaging, audio and videoconferencing; and there is presence. Also playing in this space is Microsoft, but starting from a different position: from the desktop communication and collaboration tools that are part of teh Windows ecosystem.

Microsoft has made no secret of its ambitions. Last June it unveiled an ambitious plan to integrate all forms of communication in the enterprise and roped in some of these players to help it realise its ambitions. In July announced an advanced communications alliance with Nortel. However despite appearing to favour one player it is partnering with most of them."