Cisco has been on a buying binge as it moves into the collaboration software market. But it has yet to address one overriding question: where’s the glue that will turn an interesting collection of pieces into a coherent whole?
The latest evidence of Cisco’s ambition is on display at its Collaboration Summit, which is taking place in San Francisco the first three days of this week. Among the new products it has unveiled: its first Web-based corporate email service (for as little as $3.50 a month per user) and a social-networking portal for employees to connect with each other.
All well and good. But how do all the pieces fit together?
This is partly, but not wholly, a technology question.
Through acquisitions like WebEx, PostPath (the basis of its new email service) and Tandberg (which today was pushed back a few days as Cisco waits for minority shareholders to fall in line), Cisco has an array of different collaboration platforms to try to integrate.
The first steps in that direction can already be seen – for instance, in the new feature this week that integrates video from Cisco’s Telepresence system into Webex online conferences.
Combining some of the features to devise specific solutions like this, though, still leaves open the bigger question: What is the vision that combines all these things, and makes Cisco a true rival to Microsoft, IBM and – increasingly – Google?
As Ken Dulaney at Gartner put it when I spoke to him earlier: What Cisco lacks is a common user interface and underlying data structure for its collaboration services. That is what Microsoft and IBM have, and it means they can keep adding new features to their existing suites of collaboration tools as they expand.
Ultimately, Cisco’s push into collaboration looks like a bet on voice and video – it is a communications play. It is trying to add the tools to this that make workers more productive, but it is a very different starting point to the traditional collaboration companies.
Of course, even if they continue to be run largely as stand-alone services, Cisco’s collaboration tools will still amount to a collection of powerful, bandwidth-hungry businesses, which is what the company needs to drive its growth. But John Chambers’ ultimate claim is that he can make workers more productive, and that means creating a whole that is worth more than the sum of the parts.
As Mr Dulaney says: Cisco needs to lay out a more comprehensive vision for where it is going in collaboration, and how it is going to get there.
