Cisco sets its sights on $US34b collaboration market

Stuart Corner
Friday, 03 October 2008 11:57

Opinion and Analysis

The next goal of growing this $US27b market to $US34b by adding collaboration will, however, require a significant shift in the way companies like Cisco sell to and service their corporate customers.

While IP telephony and unified comms clearly support corporate business processes, and while much work has been done to enable a wide range of devices and systems to brought into the UC fold, unified communications systems are largely separate from those processes. Collaboration will mean much tighter integration with corporate applications and business processes.

Cisco claims that its new collaboration portfolio has been designed to "interoperate with business applications, communications devices and Web-based tools while allowing IT departments to maintain their mandates regarding security, policy and compliance."


And, according to Hughes the collaboration market meets Cisco's criteria for one in which it will aim to be a major player: the network is the platform for collaboration; it's a market in transition, with a great deal happening. Cisco presently has a low market share.

However it is not alone in its vision of integrating communications tools with business processes,  and it's not the first. A year ago Avaya announced  Avaya Communications Enabled Business Processes, describing these as "enhancing operational efficiency, worker productivity and customer satisfaction by streamlining human engagement in critical business processes [with] solutions that integrate with business process applications to predict and sense events, then respond by managing real-time multi-channel communication with process users and decision-makers."

Avaya might be very strong in enterprise telephony and unified communications technologies, but unlike Cisco it does not supply the underlying network.

And even Cisco lacks the deep understanding of these corporate applications and business that will be needed to carry off its grand plan successfully. An indication surely of where Cisco might be looking for the next in its very long line of acquisition targets.