Cisco Collaboration Summit and Q1 Earnings - is Their Mojo Back?

It's a tricky question, and I know some people would love to say YES and some would love to say NO.

I'm leaning towards yes, but this is no slam dunk, especially if you're an investor. I attended their annual Collaboration Summit a couple of weeks back in Boca Raton - what's not to like? - and Cisco had their Q1 earnings call last week. I felt badly because I didn't get a chance to blog about the summit, but the stars have lined up for now, and I found that after the Q1 earnings call, there was actually a better story to tell.

That's what I've done for this month's contribution to the UCStrategies portal. Whether you're inside or outside the Cisco tent, I think you'll find this is a good read, and would love to know if you think they've got their mojo back.

Cisco Cius - Impressive Demo - But Will the Market Buy?

Been too busy to post about this til now, and hopefully, there's still an appetite to hear more about the launch of Cisco's Cius tablet on Wednesday. I say "hopefully", not just because I don't move in Internet time and am not big on instant analysis, but also because so much of what I've seen out there is just descriptive rehashing of what Cius does - not what it is or what it means. I can't believe how lazy people are, just endlessly re-tweeting this type of coverage - and surely I hope you don't view Twitter as the final word as an authoritative source. I'll save that one for another day.

I'll start off by saying this is the warm-up post. I'm just going to recap a few key takeaways, which I'll flesh out further in my next UCStrategies writeup - look for that early next week. I attended a hands-on demo of Cius on Wednesday at Cisco's Canadian headquarters here in Toronto, so I can actually say I have a first-hand account of the product as well as the benefit of the in-depth presentations onsite as well as via telepresence.

Before sharing some thoughts, you may know that the Cius story is a year in the making. Cius was announced at last year's C-Scape (and I'll be there this year in about 10 days), and I wrote up my impressions shortly after for the UCStrategies portal.

A lot has happened since the announcement last July, and in this case, I think it plays into Cisco's favor. The tablet market has exploded since then, and while the iPad is still the "it" device for consumers, we've since seen Flare and more recently, the PlayBook for the business market. I'm sure Cisco has learned from those launches, and following their hasty exit from the consumer video space with Flip, their go-to-market with Cius has become pretty focused.

Cisco's GTM for Cius isn't bullet proof, but I think it makes for a strong entry given how fast this market is growing. Nobody has a solid value proposition yet for the business market with tablets, which is still very much an early adopter space. The Cius demo only confirmed my belief that while this bright, shiny object has undeniable sex appeal, both vendors and end users don't really know what it or how to integrate it with everything else they're already using. The last thing we want is another gadget to carry around, and it's too early to tell if Cius will displace other end points, or simply add to the mix.

Regardless, I believe Cisco is in a truly unique position to make tablets a success in the business market, but a lot of things have to go right, and of course, businesses need to see a reason to buy. With so many employees using iPads for fun, it's going to be interesting to see how they drive adoption.

Most techhy types that I know routinely carry an iPhone and a BlackBerry - it's pretty clear that an iPhone just doesn't cut it for business. I could see the same thing happening here with tablets - where are people going to put all these gadgets? Restaurant tables are going to get very crowded now when people meet, and do their usual power moves to lay out all their devices so they don't miss a call, or a sports score, or a tweet, or whatever.

Can you picture that? Two guys meet for lunch, and out come the phones and the tablets. Two guys and eight gadgets on the table - as you know, men can't project power if they keep these things in their pockets. I don't know what women are going to do! This is getting silly, but that's exactly what's going to happen - let's move on.

I'll explore more about what I think Cisco has done right in my UCS post next week, as well as what all this might mean for the Unified Communications space. Until then, here are a couple of photos from the demo, and if you made it this far, I think you'll enjoy my post next week.

For those of you up here in sunny, warm Canada (is that an oxymoron?), happy Canada Day! And for my expats south of us, Happy 4th!

Cisco Takeaways: Five Ways to Rethink Communications

I've been writing a fair bit about last week's Cisco Collaboration Summit, but that's because there's a lot to talk about. This time, I've channeled some new thoughts into my latest Focus Brief. The idea here is to summarize five themes that I believe business decision-makers need think more critically about, and for you to mull over during the Thanksgiving break.

Cisco is looking to play an even bigger role than most of you can imagine for our workplace needs, and if their plans come to fruition, these themes will become core drivers for communications planning at all levels. To follow my thinking, you can read my brief on Focus.com now, and then let me know if I'm on target or not.

UCStrategies Podcast - Cisco, Microsoft and HP

Last week sure was busy in the IP comms space, and while a few of us were busy at Cisco's Collaboration Summit, others were busy following news from Microsoft and HP. I've shared a few things about Cisco's event already, with one more coming today.

I can now add this podcast to the list of analysis and commentary. This was our weekly group call with UCStrategies analysts, and we reviewed our thoughts about the summit along with these other major news events. The podcast can be downloaded here, and there's a transcript if you'd rather just read along.

Cisco FY 2011 Analyst Update

As Cisco's universe keeps expanding, we all have to work a little harder to keep pace. One of the many things Cisco does very well is host sessions to update the analyst community, and probably more than any other company, they truly walk the walk. As with all vendors, they have near overkill on webinar and phone briefings - wouldn't you, if you spent $3 billion on WebEx? They do plenty of live events - which are always great - and with the magic of another expensive technology - telepresence - we get our share of virtual events.

Today was the virtual variety, and I was one of only two analysts in Canada who got the telepresence treatment at Cisco's Canadian HQ here in downtown Toronto. I've done a few of these, and it's always a good experience. The meeting synched up 5 locations - Toronto, San Jose, London and a couple of sites in the Boston area. They're getting pretty good at this, and the session definitely feels immersive and life-like.

The session itself was led by Frank Calderoni, EVP/CFO, and he did a pretty good walkthrough of Cisco's overall plans and growth expectations. Some of this was familiar from what I saw at C-Scape this summer, but quite a bit was new. He spent a fair bit of time reviewing their VSE mantra - these are the principles that drive the company - Vision, Strategy and Execution. It all makes sense, and is built squarely around the notion that the network is everything - it's the platform that "enables new business models and organizational structures". Fair enough. Every company has its culture and guiding lights, and it's very clear from this what makes Cisco go.

They layered a few other things on this, namely DNO and CPAD. This is first nature if you work for Cisco, and I guess it will become second nature to us if we stay with the program. If you must know, DNO is Dynamic Networked Organization, and CPAD is Cisco Priority Assessment Dashboard. We didn't have acronyms like this during my MBA days - but we didn't have computers either (there really was a time like this!). I'm sure if I did a re-fresh, these would be the kinds of best practices concepts that we'd be learning about.

Back to why we're really here. So, as we heard at C-Scape, Cisco has become an innovation machine, and the 400+ new products over the past year is impressive by any standard. They also have $40 billion in cash, so there's nothing they can't buy if the mood struck. Not surprisingly, they're now moving to issue a dividend - that idle cash isn't exactly earning much interest and shareholders need to be kept happy.

Looking forward, the main message is the growth outlook. They expect a 12 - 17% annual growth rate over the next 3-5 years, and Frank did a good job breaking that down. Most of this will come from overall market growth, and the rest will come from three main places. First will be growth from increased share of wallet they gain from customers as their product mix expands. Second will be growth from emerging countries, which are on a different trajectory than the developed world. Finally, there will be some growth from what they call "market adjacencies" - these are new spaces/verticals that Cisco is growing into, such as healthcare and smart grid. All told, it's a pretty reasonable picture, and if they can sustain this level, it will be a real testament not just to what they sell to their customers, but more impressively, how the company itself operates and executes on its plans. When you look at how many sectors and companies in the U.S. are poorly run (with some getting bailouts), Cisco is in many ways a great model for doing things right. That really was the main takeaway for me.

To be fair, of course, we all know that a lot of Cisco's forays into new spaces is by design, and steps on a lot of toes. Traditional partners are now becoming competitors, and there's more of an us-or-them climate out there than in the past. That's not really Cisco's problem, as they simply need to find new growth opportunities to get beyond the core router/switching business that they've done such a great job saturating. While this core accounts for 50% of their business today, Frank explained how they see the other areas accounting for most of the future growth. Right now, all these areas fall under the "Advanced Technologies" bucket, which today is 24% of sales. This includes pretty much everything that isn't routers or switches - telepresence, video, data centers, mobility, etc. They're betting pretty heavily on these markets - and I would be too.

There's a lot to keep on top of here, and I'm glad I attended this update. This is one of those companies that you can fall behind on in a big way if you stop following them, especially since they are so global now. For better or worse, they're too big to ignore, but they're doing right by me in terms of keeping us in the loop.

Next Stop - Cisco C-Scape, Las Vegas

Next week is Part 2 of my back-to-back western trips, and I'll be in ridiculously hot and excessive Las Vegas for Cisco's annual C-Scape analyst event. The event is paired with Cisco Live, which is a great showcase for all the collaboration technologies and solutions they've been so aggressively marketing.

Cutting down on travel saves time and money for everyone, and from what I've seen so far, Cisco Live is a pretty good virtual experience. It's really come a long way from their earlier virtual environments, which reminded me a lot of Lego Island (anyone with kids will know what I mean). There's a much stronger social media component now, and in some ways, it's a better way to collaborate, since it's much easier to know more about others in your midst, as well as being able to engage with them.

Collaboration is always better in person, but that assumes you know everyone around you, and are able to bring them together at the same time. C-Scape is a pretty big event, and for everyone in your orbit that you know, there will always be many others that you don't.

Enough said, and I'll just add that I'm glad to be part of the in-person contingent going to C-Scape, and I'll do my best to keep you updated here and on Twitter.

Cisco - Q2 Collaboration Review

Today was the first time I've attended one of Cisco's Collaboration Reviews via telepresence. Telephone or WebEx sessions are the norm, and while they're usually pretty good, TP is the next best thing to being there. Before getting your hopes up too high, this wasn't a full-blown TP session (and I've been on plenty of those). It was just me and their AR liaision, Andrea Berry at Cisco Canada's HQ in downtown Toronto. While this was a global event, with 22 analysts participating, it looks like I was the lone Canadian analyst - lucky me. So, I can say with pretty good confidence that this may well be the first news you've heard about today.

There wasn't anything really groundbreaking, and the session was just an hour - and I mean that literally. Cisco makes extensive use of TP internally, and apparently their TP rooms are booked months in advance. So, when your time slot is up, it's up. The screen abruptly went blank on the host in mid-sentence at 1pm on the dot. Gotta keep the train moving I guess.

Most of the talking was done by two key drivers of their collaboration initiatives - Barry O'Sullivan - SVP Voice Technology Group, and Carl Wiese - SVP Global Collaboration Sales. They had a lot to recap from the recent quarter, and here are the main points that I can share:

- they posted 17% year-over-year growth across their collaboration portfolio - UC, contact center, telepresence, IP telephony, WebEx, etc.

- like any vendor in this space, they have been aggressively going after competitors who have struggled, namely Nortel, Siemens and ALU

- while revenues were not disclosed, they cited early successes in their various spaces - 12 customers now using WebEx Mail (all are U.S. and primarily SMB), 450+ are using cloud-based IM, over 3,600 locations using telepresence, and 75 customers using Show and Share

- perhaps the strongest message overall was their move into hosted services - this will now give their customers a choice between premise-based and carrier-based solutions

- highlights were given about 4 recent customer wins - each one showcasing a particular strength of Cisco or attractive market opportunity

- their objective of providing "pervasive video" - both big and small - was briefly discussed, but no updates on the Tandberg deal were given

A couple of these points warrant a bit more detail, so here goes...

Regarding WebEx Mail, that was a highlight for me at their Collaboration Summit last November. They shared one lesson learned with us today, which I found interesting. Their early deployments did not support BlackBerry, and it looks like they underestimated how important this was, even for SMBs. As such, they've had to accelerate BlackBerry integration to keep these deployments moving forward. I asked if they had any indication yet as to whether their email platform has led to faster adoption of other collaboration tools. They liked the question, but didn't have much to say - am guessing it's early days, but I have to think that's the end game here.

The move to hosted has huge implications, and the analysts had lots of questions about this one. I wanted to better understand the role they seek to play, especially in terms of owning the customer and sharing revenues with service providers. They talked about their intent being to get the carrier set up to offer hosted, and then let them run with it. The acronym they used is BOT - "Build, Operate and Transfer". That's the process, and we'll just have to see how it actually unfolds. It's clear they want to have it both ways - deploy on-prem, as well as partner with carriers - with the customer choosing the best path. They wouldn't quantify the market opportunity, but did go so far to say that it "appears real". They're in talks with 10 carriers now, and BT is the one they point to as an announced partner for hosted. There is a lot of potential here for channel conflict, and Cisco is not afraid to tread on new ground. However, I got the sense they are approaching hosted cautiously, and it looked to me like they were choosing their words carefully. Regardless, they're not going to ignore the hosted market, so get used to it, folks.

Two customer wins were of particular interest to me. One was Duke University, where they talked about how they're using telepresence to help extend the classroom experience off campus. I've long felt that distance learning is a huge opportunity, and that IP technologies will play a big role in re-defining higher education.

The other customer win was Molina Healthcare. Aside from this being another great vertical market for collaboration, they cited an interesting outcome from deploying telepresence there. They're finding that people are meeting twice as often, but for half as long. That's a pretty good result, and a great way to validate the value of telepresence.

Finally, I just had to comment on the actual experience of using TP today. Since the topic was collaboration, one would expect the tools for the meeting would properly reflect that. For the most part they did. Even though the screen we used was fairly small - see photos below - both the audio and video quality were very good. However, there was no use of split screens, which would have been effective at times, since Barry and Carl were in different locations. As such, the visuals were very much in a serial manner. One speaker at a time - cut to the next speaker - cut back to the first speaker, etc. I found it a bit like watching a newscast - it's ok, but not that engaging.

Two other small things. I suspect other locations had multiple screens, whereas we only had one. When the host was addressing me, she was looking to the right, which must have been the screen she was seeing me on. This would look perfectly normal from her end, but Andrea and I only saw her looking right, and not at us. This takes some getting used to, as it wasn't clear that she was talking to me. To us, it looked like she was talking to someone else. Live and learn.

The other small thing was the use of a slide deck during the session. They were really just used in passing reference, and most of our attention was centered on the speakers. That was probably for the best, since the slides were only displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. Since we had a small TP unit, the slides were really small, and almost impossible to read. I'm sure this would be less of a problem on a full-size system, so I guess this comes with the territory. On the other hand, I would have been just as happy to have no slides, which would give us an unobstructed view of the speaker (see photos below). For any speaker sitting on that side of the screen, the slides block out a good portion of their body. While Anderson Cooper would probably roll with that, Ted Baxter would be freaking out - so, as long as the egos are in check, it's probably not a problem. :-)


Barry O'Sullivan


Carl Wiese

Cisco Collaboration Summit - Day 2

Tuesday was end-to-end Cisco, starting at 8, going through til 5 with a series of presentations around various aspects of collaboration and cloud services. It was a pretty intense day, and if there was one thing everyone could agree one, it was the overwhelming amount of information.

There was definitely a lot of interesting content here - a mix of demos, announcements and vision - but it's not the kind of thing you can distill into a sentence of two. To me, that's the strength and weakness of events like this. It's a strength in that having us all here is an efficient way to get all this information across - fair enough. However, it's also up to us to make sense of it all, and with so many new things to take in, everyone will have their own take on what Cisco is doing here.

Without a doubt, the word of the day around here is "collaboration", and it turns up in about every third sentence. Fair enough, and there's no doubt that the focus is on how people work together, and Cisco wants to be in the middle of all this. Until recently, most of Cisco's messaging has been around the network and convergence of various technologies. There's a definite shift now from convergence to collaboration, but as we're seeing across all the sessions, there are so many branches to this tree.

As hard as Cisco is trying to be the great enabler of collaboration, it's a very broad pallet, and these capabilities don't emerge overnight. They're about as far along as any company can possibly be, and as you get your head around the scope of all this, you have to wonder how willing and able enterprises are to run with Cisco. No doubt Cisco is getting its share of traction, but I think it's going to take some time for businesses to catch up with all this, especially since we heard very little about the ROI story.

I'll leave you with some photos and narrative to give you a sense of the topics we heard about yesterday. If there was one takeway to share it was their WebEx Mail announcment. I commented about this briefly in the last two photos below, but I'll also point you to an article that David Greenfield wrote yesterday on ZDNet about the news.

I should add that the genesis of this story very much embodied the spirit of collaboration we've been hearing so much about here. During the WebEx Mail demo yesterday, I was IM'g with David on Skype, and within an hour I had given him enough narrative and one of my photos for him to get an article written and posted. That's pretty much a real-time form of collaboration, and I'll bet he had the very first published article about this launch. Way to go, Dave!

I'll stop now, and leave you with some photos.

Demo with David Knight and the virtues for enterprises to use a blend of premise based and cloud based collaboration solutions


Charles Stucki and the rationale for Cisco's big push into video


Video demo where Charles talked about Tandberg and how Cisco can seamlessy interop with Tandberg, Polycom and Lifesize - all at the same time


Rick Emery, talking about what Jabber brings to Cisco



Laurent Philonenko demonstrating Cisco Unified Presence 8.0, and their advanced capabilities for working across various IM platforms


Murali Sitaram talking about ESS - Enterprise Social Software - and Show and Share, their new solution to enable video-based collaboration. Pretty neat stuff, including tagging video content and making it searchable, just as you would with text-based content.



Duncan Greatwood and the "evolution of email". This was the highlight for me, and we got a solid demo of their just-launched WebEx Mail service. For any heavy user of email, it wasn't hard to see how they've added intelligence, and made the user experience more powerful. It's especially attractive in that you never have to leave the email interface to do other things such as start a chat session, retrieve and review files, and access the personal profile and contact history of anyone in your log of messages.

Cisco Collaboration Summit - Day 1

Yesterday was the kickoff for Cisco's Collaboration Summit. Last year I attended virtually, and this was my first time going in person. As with other Cisco events, it's very well staged, and has the feel of a rock concert at times. Given that the focus is on collaboration and using all the multimedia tools to fullest effect, it all felt about right.

There was a lot of buildup around the slew of releases coming from Cisco now, and they made this clear repeatedly, so the basic message is that Cisco is up to some big things and jumping to new curves. That's not a new message from Cisco these days, and they shared a lot of vision with us about how they're taking collaboration and the cloud to new levels, and how this is going to change the way we work.

A lot of the discussion was around plumbing and architectures, and not being an IT guy, the technical revelations were not as interesting to me as the focus on what collaboration and the cloud means to the enterprise and the end user experience.

Things opened with an appropos reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened 20 years ago yesterday. Of course, Cisco is trying to do the same thing with their vision for collaboration. They view this as a $30 billion opportunity, and in short, their definition of collaboration is people + teams + information. Fair enough, but it's going to take the better part of 3 days to explain all this to us.

Even though yesterday's session was only 2 hours long, I wasn't alone in trying to get my head around the multitude of announcements and initiatives Cisco shared with us. Lots of talk, esp from John Chambers, about the need to have strength in two areas - the underlying technologies, as well as being supported by business processes that are driven by specific goals for the enterprise.

They spent a lot of times demonstrating this by Cisco's own example in terms of how they've done a lot of this themselves. John Chambers talked about the cultural changes Cisco has gone through, shifting from "command and control" to "teamwork and innovation". He backed this up talking about Cisco making 4 acquisitions in the past 45 days, which could only been possible by having all these collaboration capabilities in place. Am not sure if enterprise customers have taken these ideas totally to heart, but Cisco sure seems to have made the move, and it's hard to deny that they have a lot of agility for a company of its size and global reach.

Otherwise, lots of impressive demos and messaging about how "the new normal" is driven by collaboration, especially video. Most of the focus is about Webex and Telepresence, with a few references to IP phones (esp the new 9971 video-enabled phone). Remember routers? Not a word here. This is all about defining the new normal - helping IT cope with the endless treadmill that IP is putting us on - more info than ever before, more devices, more access, more security risks, more storage needs, more power/energy demands, fast time to market, etc. More, more, more.

If you can figure all this out, then Cisco has the answers. I can't sum this up with a simple explanation - that's why we're here for 3 days. So, conceptually, we all get it, and in Cisco's mind, the path is clear. With each passing session, it's getting clearer to the rest of us, so just bear with me another day or two.

Waiting to begin - setting the stage...





See that glow above his head? That's the JC halo - it follows him everywhere - he's so good getting his message across...



Nice demo here, with a video image on the right for Telepresence, and the same image on the left on Cisco's new IP phone.

Next Stop - San Fran - Cisco Collaboration Summit

It's been a busy few weeks travel-wise, and my last stop is finally coming up. Next week, I'll be in San Francisco, attending Cisco's 2009 Collaboration Summit.

Not much more to say, but I feel lucky to be part of this group, and collaboration is definitely of interest to me these days. Cisco has been active in this space all year, even if you put the Tandberg story aside. Am sure that will be one of the topics of discussion, but I'm particularly interested in how they'll be going to market with scaled down collaboration solutions that will have broader market appeal. As I saw on my Telepresence panel at Supercomm last month, Cisco is doing just fine there, but not everyone needs or wants full scale TP.

Anyhow, I rarely get to San Francisco, so this will be nice stop. I'm there Monday through Wednesday, and if things go to plan, I'll be done traveling for 2009. Time will tell.

Supercomm - Day 1/Life's Twists and Turns

I arrived earlier today for Supercomm and moderated a session on telepresence this afternoon. It was quite well attended, and our panel was in good hands with Lee Himbeault from Telus, Mark Weidick from Cisco and Phillipe Millet from Orange (and the i3 Forum). We were pleasantly surprised to find that only a handful of people in the audience had experienced telepresence, so we had lots to talk about.

Aside from that, I kept running into people all afternoon and didn't get a chance to see any sessions or walk the exhibit hall, but I'll do that tomorrow. Most of the impressions so far though, have been that the show is much smaller than the past. I'll just have to see for myself tomorrow, and will let you know.

Thought I'd share a quick slice of life from my trip back to the hotel. Sometimes things happen without rhyme or reason, but something interesting always seems to come from it. Inexplicably, I got on the wrong shuttle bus, but got dropped not that far from my hotel. As soon as I stepped off the bus at the front of the Hyatt Hotel, there was a pretty vocal anti-Israel demonstration with both sides separated by barricades and lots of police watching closely. The pro-Palestinians were far greater in number, and there were a handful of Israel supporters on the other side, which is where I quickly gravitated.

The ignorance, hostility, racism was really hard to watch, especially since most of the pro Palestinians looked American - and even more sinister seeing them wrapped in the Palestinian flag, wearing the black and white headscarfs, and carrying some pretty nasty placards. To give you a taste, this was typical of what they were chanting in unison, camp sing-along style: "Hey there Israel, what do you say? How many children did you kill today?" Ugh.

Y'know, I saw Inglorious Basterds with my 13 year old son recently, and came away feeling a bit uncomfortable, but still pretty good about the film. It's a perverse form of Jewish pride (but everything Tarrantino does is a bit perverse - that's another topic altogether), but after seeing this ugly display of brainwashed hate masquerading as some form of legitimate protest, I don't feel the least bit queasy.

I just felt bad that the pro-Israel side was so outnumbered, and I hope it ended peacefully. When I heard a white woman from their side scream "go back to Europe", I wasn't so sure, but the police presence was pretty strong. Wow.

Freedom of speech is what makes democracy special, and these people obviously have no idea how good they have it here. Just try to open your mouth in Gaza and see what happens. I'd better stop - I know protests like this happen all the time, but to see it up close like this kinda sticks with you and makes you wonder what makes people think like this. Anyhow, I've posted a few photos and you can draw your own conclusions.

I'll be back tomorrow with Day 2 of Supercomm.





I know I got on the wrong bus, but am I really still in Chicago???




"Olmert's A Whore" - nice t-shirt, buddy...



Not sure why there were so few supporting Israel, but I was glad to stand with them. Makes you wonder, though, when these Israel-bashers organize protests like this and basically nobody is listening, you'd think they'd wonder if maybe their message needs a re-think. I highly doubt it - hate trumps reason every time.




Let's end on a positive note. As big cities go, it doesn't get much better than Chicago, and the Wrigley Building is just so cool, especially lit up like this.

Next Stop - Chicago and Supercomm

October is a busy month for me, and next week I'll be in Chicago for part of Supercomm. I haven't been to this event recently, and it's gone through a few iterations, but I'm looking forward to being there.

My main involvement will be moderating a panel on telepresence, and I'll be joined by Telus, Cisco and Orange/i3 Forum. With this mix, the focus will be more carrier-centric, which is a nice change from TP sessions that are typically built around the end users.

I can't seem to find a direct link to the session on their website, so if you want to learn more, the easiest way is via this link on my website, where I explain how to find it. In short, the session is on Wednesday at 4:05, Room W183C. Hope to see you there.

Otherwise, I'll be there through Thursday, and plan to spend that day in meetings, walking the floor, catching up with people, and if I'm lucky actually seeing some sessions or speakers!

Cisco's New Vision for Telepresence and Collaboration

Last Friday I had an engaging briefing with Cisco about their latest vision for collaboration, Unified Communications and Telepresence - perhaps the largest words in Cisco's lexicon these days. I mean that in the strategic sense of course, as these have been major growth themes for them since last year. Their news was under embargo until today, but I've been quite busy both in and out of the office today, and this is my first chance to post.

We all know about Cisco's Telepresence ambitions at the high end of the market, and they've done a great job there. It's getting a lot harder to find takers in this economy, and it's been just a matter of time until Cisco scaled down the product for the rest of us. They've been going in this direction for a while, but the latest iteration puts it that much more within reach of the mainstream business market.

There are a lot of moving parts to this story, so much so that there were two news releases about it - here and here. All told, this forms the Cisco Collaboration Portfolio, and pulls together a multitude of technologies and solutions that serve to make us more productive in the workplace.

Apologies if I'm sounding a bit vague here, but I'm struggling to share the essence of this in words. We covered an awful lot of ground in our briefing, and touched on just about every form of communication and collaboration, with all of it in some way falling under this portfolio umbrella. I know there's a lot of good value here, and during the briefing we talked about the challenges of pulling this together and articulating a clear value proposition.

On one level, this portfolio concept is Cisco's way of building on network-centric solutions and becoming more applications-centric. Looking at the bigger pieces - Telepresence, WebEx, mobility, iPhone support, integration with Microsoft Office - it's mostly about apps and endpoints - not a lot here about routers and switches or their more recent move into blade servers. Fair enough - we know this is where the growth is, and Cisco has rightly bet heavily that video is a key driver.

All told, there is a lot to like about what Cisco is doing here, and I wish I could convey it in short, simple terms. On a marketing level that could be a challenge unto itself, as the story I'm hearing is mostly about productivity and efficiency rather than cost savings. I don't want to sound too pedestrian, but saving money seems to be the big - and sometimes only - thing people I'm in contact with want to talk about right now.

Cisco does not chase these cost-driven businesses as a matter of course, but it's harder to be picky these days. That said, there is certainly an important segment of the market that will buy into their portfolio concept - and one of the press releases is largely built around an independent study validating this.

My main takeaway from all this is that if collaboration and improving business processes is high on your strategy agenda, then Cisco's Collaboration Portfolio will resonate very well. It was great to see a scaled down Telepresence system - the 1300 - and I really loved the Recording Studio concept.

The very first time I saw Telepresence, I asked whether sessions could be recorded. At the time, the answer was no, but clearly it's yes today. During the briefing we touched on some great examples of how Telepresence is being used to record video segments for things like training, job interviews, making announcements and recording presentations for future use. To me, that's what makes this technology cool - enabling new ways of working that could not be done before. Not to mention in Hi Def.

To balance out this post, my main caveat is that if it's this complex to explain, then it's too complex for the market. Maybe not all the market, but a big piece, I'd say. I know Cisco has a good idea here and the right idea, but it takes a bit of effort to understand all the pieces and how they fit together. That's fine - it's an emerging space, and nobody has figured it out, so it's hard to expect the precision of Procter & Gamble here. That time will come, I'm sure, but we're not there yet.

On another level, of course, this is tricky territory in that Cisco is extending its market presence into areas that have usually been the domain of their partners, and invariably conflicts will arise - not just with these partners, but the channels and enterprises themselves. I don't have an easy answer to all of this other than saying business is business, and if Cisco has what the market wants, they must be doing something right.