Cisco told eWEEK it is working on Cisco Inbox, a combination of Cisco WebEx Mail and the company's social networking tools for businesses, including Enterprise Collaboration Platform, Show and Share video and Pulse tagging. Combined with the company's new Intercompany Media Engine, Cisco will have a server-software combo Google, Microsoft and IBM would find tough to compete with. At a time when these vendors are looking to well-rounded solutions, Cisco appears to have an edge -- and it's backed by the network.
Cisco Nov. 9 unveiled several new solutions at its Cisco
Collaboration Summit, most notably Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail and
enterprise social networking tools, including Enterprise Collaboration
Platform, Show and Share and Pulse.
EWEEK detailed the new tools here, and analyzed how they differentiate from tools from Microsoft, IBM,
Google and startups
here.
Yet in a recent discussion about Cisco WebEx Mail, Alex
Hadden-Boyd, director of Cisco's collaboration platform group, said that moving
to a Web-based e-mail application will enable Cisco to eventually plug into its
enterprise social networking applications. Cisco calls this the "Cisco Inbox."
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For example, Hadden-Boyd explained, users could take an
e-mail thread from its new Cisco WebEx Mail, and post it to a wiki on the new Enterprise
Collaboration Platform, or use the new Cisco Pulse capabilities to provide
network tagging inside e-mail.
That was a pre-announcement, something that while not
ready today, is coming down the pike. That's when eWEEK had it's a-ha moment
with regard to Cisco's news.
Let's consider Cisco's potential plays for the future.
Cisco WebEx Mail, which has a Web 2.0 client provided by Yahoo's Zimbra, will
eventually be plugged into the company's new Enterprise Collaboration Platform.
That platform not only includes the wiki workspaces,
profiles and tagging tools, but integration with Cisco's existing WebEx voice,
instant messaging (now powered by Jabber, not AOL) and video tools. A user will
be able to find a contact profile and click a button to send an instant message
or make and audio call or video chat session.
Cisco would of course also integrate its new Show and Share
enterprise video app and Pulse. That would make Cisco the first
company to offer a Webmail
solution with complete social networking tools supported by full
unified
communications. No one is offering this in one solution.
Let's at Cisco's broader collaboration strategy. With its
latest launch, Cisco also released the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine. This
server connects to any IP network to let users at different companies
communicate using voice, video, presence, instant messaging and Web
conferencing. The Intercompany Media Engine boasts multiple levels of security
to cross firewalls.
It
could bundle the Cisco WebEx Mail, Enterprise Collaboration Platform
and software apps with the Intercompany Media Engine server and
sell it as a server-software bundle for collaboration needs between
businesses
and organizations.
That combination of secure networking hardware and
workplace applications would make quite a formidable solution pitted versus
Google, Microsoft and IBM. In fact, that would be more robust and complete than
Microsoft SharePoint, the leading collaboration solution that rakes in $1
billion-plus per year.
EWeek asked Guido Jouret, CTO of Cisco's emerging
technologies group, how the company's network approach to collaboration helps it
compete in the market versus more established players.
Jouret said video and rich media are becoming a dominant
portion of enterprise network traffic, comprising as much as 20 percent of the
content in North American businesses. Video comprises 65 percent of Cisco's
traffic, counting digital signs, telepresence and video surveillance. Jouret
added:
"We're creating an evolution of the intranet/extranet to
become what we call a medianet. Medianets are about endowing the IP network
with additional intelligence to essentially optimize collaboration and rich
media video. These have certain attributes like recording, streaming, the
ability to broadcast across company boundaries, and to dynamically transcode
video so you can shoot a video from one endpoint to another endpoint without
worrying about formats or whether or not there is enough bandwidth to ship it.
Those are attributes that applications developers today are racking their
brains over how to address. We're pushing those features into the network so the
network does all of these things."
Suddenly, Cisco's solutions seem not only new, but
prescient: a one-stop shop for collaboration needs the likes of which the
market hasn't seen. And it's all supported by the network, the root of Cisco's success.
Messaging & Collaboration 
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