UC vendors fight back against tablets in the enterprise

Stuart Corner
Monday, 11 April 2011 10:27

Opinion and Analysis

The push by employees at all levels to integrated their tablet devices into their employers' IT environment has been well documented. Less widely reported have been the moves by big unified communications vendors, Cisco and Avaya, to counter this trend and maintain their grip on the enterprise unified communications market.

Both Cisco's and Avaya's alternatives to 'consumer' tablets are Android based, although their approaches are rather different.

Cisco announced its Cius last June, billing it as "a first-of-its-kind mobile collaboration business tablet that delivers virtual desktop integration with anywhere, anytime access to the full range of Cisco collaboration and communication applications." An interesting aspect of the Cius is that it can operate as a tablet or be plugged into a docking station that converts it into a deskphone-with-screen.

Cisco promised that customer trials of Cisco Cius would begin in the third quarter of calendar year 2010, with general availability in the first quarter of calendar year 2011. That schedule appears to have slipped somewhat and it is only now about to start deploying Cius with selected customers.

To co-incide with this deployment Tom Puorro, senior director of product management, unified communications solution at Cisco made a posting on Cisco's blog enumerating "some key areas'¦that you may want to consider as you sort through the landscape of tablet options available to you to change your business processes."

A month earlier he had said much the same thing in another posting " Choosing a Tablet for the Enterprise." Neither was a direct promotion for the benefits of the Cius over 'consumer' tablet devices, but nevertheless that message came across pretty clearly.

Cisco can come up with hardware innovations, like the docking station, and can tightly integrate Cius functionality into its own UC and collaboration offerings, but it is questionable whether this will be enough to hold back the tide of employee-owned tablets. These are becoming so deeply entwined with their owners' lives that they want to bring them to work and use them for both work and personal purposes.

They certainly won't want to lug around both a work tablet and a personal tablet, which makes the approach taken by Avaya - for whom tablet seems to be dirty word - potentially more interesting. Avaya announced "the Avaya Flare Experience" last September as part of a suite of products, but you could read the entire announcement without getting any indication that there was a tablet device in there.

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