Cisco sets its sights on $US34b collaboration market

Stuart Corner
Friday, 03 October 2008 12:57

Opinion and Analysis

If you drop into the Loft bar on Sydney's Lime Street Wharf during October you might see lots of Cisco logos and photojournalist Moshe Rosenzveig sitting at a terminal creating digital artwork. All in the name of Cisco's next big push: for a dominant position in what it believes will be a $US34b global market for collaboration tools and services.

Creating artwork might seem a strange way for Cisco to promote its credentials in a sector of the corporate IT&T market, but Rosenzveig is not working alone. He's collaborating; creating digital artworks from images submitted over the web by anyone who cares  to register at imagine-if.info .

And he is doing it using what Cisco intends to be the primary vehicle to give it a big slice of that $US34b collaboration market:  WebEx, the collaboration-via-the-web service provider acquired by Cisco for $US3.2b in 2007.

Cisco has followed that acquisition with a few others to build out its collaboration portfolio; most recently, on 23 September, of open-source instant-messaging start-up Jabber.

That announcement was followed a day later by a major positioning statement from Cisco of its intent for this $US34b collaboration market. Cisco has 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."

According to Peter Hughes, Cisco ANZ's general manager, unified communications. It's Cisco's bid to keep riding a wave that started building back in 2000 when IP telephony started to make in impact in the Enterprise.

Cisco has successfully ridden that wave as the market has grown to be worth $US12 billion, giving rise as it grew to unified communications, which, according to Hughes, combined with enterprise IP telephony is now a $US27b market.
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