unified communications
enterprise unified communications views and opinions
Sunday 2 November 2008, 8:06 PM
What do Cisco’s recent acquisitions mean for the UC market?
Cisco’s acquisition of PostPath, a collaboration server vendor, and Jabber, an IM and presence software developer, are important from a number of perspectives.
Firstly, they are small but significant steps in Cisco’s evolution from hardware vendor to software and services provider. They also augment Cisco’s UC offering with improved e-mail, calendaring, IM and presence functionality. This will enable it to compete more directly with Microsoft for ownership of the corporate desktop communications environment. However, these acquisitions also better enable Cisco to work with customers existing infrastructure. And this will make the transition to UC a lot less daunting for many IT decision-makers.
The fact is that despite all the hype about hosted UC, many companies aren’t ready to ditch their existing infrastructure and the familiarity of a CPE and Microsoft Exchange-based communications system - at least not now, and not on an organisation-wide basis. Deploying UC on a smaller scale to test its usefulness for specific sites or departments makes more sense to most companies at this stage in the development of the market. And that isn’t an ideal model for providers looking to supply a hosted UC solution. Cisco’s acquisitions help it to address this dilemma by enabling it to offer its customers CPEbased integration with Microsoft Exchange and extended UC functionality in the short term, and a feature-rich hosted alternative to Microsoft Office Communications Server in the longer term.
As a result, Cisco gains the flexibility to adapt its offering to customers’ state of readiness for UC adoption. And this increases its credibility with customers as it tries to gain similar levels of acceptance in the desktop communications space as it has in the network environment.
Of course, this is also good news for enterprises, who get more choice when it comes to deciding on a UC implementation strategy. It also helps them delay the PBX replacement discussion, a big barrier to UC adoption. Instead, they now have the option to implement a Cisco solution that can be used with existing CPE now, and migrate to a network-hosted solution when they are ready.
Greater service flexibility and increased customer choice should also contribute to the development of the wider UC market by stimulating overall demand and accelerating the real-world delivery of UC benefits both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’.
Firstly, they are small but significant steps in Cisco’s evolution from hardware vendor to software and services provider. They also augment Cisco’s UC offering with improved e-mail, calendaring, IM and presence functionality. This will enable it to compete more directly with Microsoft for ownership of the corporate desktop communications environment. However, these acquisitions also better enable Cisco to work with customers existing infrastructure. And this will make the transition to UC a lot less daunting for many IT decision-makers.
The fact is that despite all the hype about hosted UC, many companies aren’t ready to ditch their existing infrastructure and the familiarity of a CPE and Microsoft Exchange-based communications system - at least not now, and not on an organisation-wide basis. Deploying UC on a smaller scale to test its usefulness for specific sites or departments makes more sense to most companies at this stage in the development of the market. And that isn’t an ideal model for providers looking to supply a hosted UC solution. Cisco’s acquisitions help it to address this dilemma by enabling it to offer its customers CPEbased integration with Microsoft Exchange and extended UC functionality in the short term, and a feature-rich hosted alternative to Microsoft Office Communications Server in the longer term.
As a result, Cisco gains the flexibility to adapt its offering to customers’ state of readiness for UC adoption. And this increases its credibility with customers as it tries to gain similar levels of acceptance in the desktop communications space as it has in the network environment.
Of course, this is also good news for enterprises, who get more choice when it comes to deciding on a UC implementation strategy. It also helps them delay the PBX replacement discussion, a big barrier to UC adoption. Instead, they now have the option to implement a Cisco solution that can be used with existing CPE now, and migrate to a network-hosted solution when they are ready.
Greater service flexibility and increased customer choice should also contribute to the development of the wider UC market by stimulating overall demand and accelerating the real-world delivery of UC benefits both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’.
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