Cisco Systems officials are getting ready to launch a collaboration
platform that brings together social networking capabilities and
enterprise-level applications and other features.
Cisco officials are expected to further detail their
Quad platform at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, which runs
June 14-17.
The company is looking to enable a businesses to use
the various communications features in such social media environments
as Facebook and MySpace—from profiles, updates and video communications
to Twitter-like microblogging, posts, people search, RSS feeds and
auto-tagging—that employees have taken advantage of in their personal
lives and apply them to the corporate world.
The platform’s landing page is dubbed MyView, a
customizable space that enables the user to view the various people and
projects they’re following, check the calendar, communities and
activities they’re involved in, and start any communications—via IM,
e-mail or video conference—they need to conduct.
At the same time, Cisco is bringing enterprise-level
features to the platform, including business applications, management
and security, including integration with Cisco’s Enterprise Policy
Manager offering. The security features include rules-based policies,
encryption for communications and the ability to manage restricted and
private communities, according to the company.
It also will support integration with Microsoft
SharePoint and Exchange, and EMC’s Documentum product. Cisco also is
bringing its own collaboration products to Quad, including integration
with Cisco Unified Communications solutions, WebEx conferencing, and
Show and Share social video technology.
Cisco’s Quad platform—named after college quads,
where students and faculty tend to congregate socially—comes as people
have branched out in their use of Facebook and MySpace, moving from
using the sites simply as a way of keeping in touch socially to
conducting business, according to analysts. It brings with the social
networking functionality while imposing tight security and policy
oversight.
Cisco is looking to take advantage of the prevalent
social networking use to help businesses increase productivity and
collaboration within their firewalls.
It also comes as other vendors, including Google with its recently announced Wave product, SAP’s 12Sprint offering and Microsoft via SharePoint, aim to help companies increase their collaboration capabilities.
Cisco Quad reportedly has been into a beta test in
the fall. The company showed off Quad in its booth at the VoiceCon 2010
show in March in Orlando, Fla.
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