For the first time, Cisco has assembled all of its software assets – IOS, Unified Communications, Collaboration and Network Management – under a single organization. The Software Group was formed to coordinate product development and inject a common set of services across all of Cisco's software. Senior Vice President Don Proctor took some time at this week's C-Scape analyst conference to talk with Network World Managing Editor Jim Duffy about Cisco's software plan.

Can you discuss your charter and what it means for Cisco?

We've always had a lot of software developers at Cisco. It's the bulk of what we do even though we're known as a hardware company. This is the first time we've brought all of the major software businesses together. The timing reflects the evolution of our business from being just a set of products to a real platform. I use that word carefully not to mean a platform for other Cisco engineers to build things on but a platform for our customers and partners also to build things on.

What are your priorities with the software group? What's the first order of business?

One very important thing we want to do is to share processes and practices and technology across the groups to make sure that we're continuing to meet our quality objectives. With respect to common services, making sure that when we implement, for example, an advanced signaling protocol or something that represents an advanced function in quality of service that it's implemented that same way in our applications, in our infrastructure services and in our operating system. So that customers can really get to the point where the provisioning of new services on the network is a less laborious process. The third thing is really coordinating some of the efforts we have across the company at building a third-party developer community, which includes IOS but also our unified communications suite and WebEx, which has been building its own ecosystem for the past couple of years.

How far up the software stack do you plan to go? Applications?

If you look at the portfolio today for the enterprise you'll see that we have solutions at every layer of the stack, all the way up to applications with our collaboration applications. What we're doing with some of the SaaS assets with WebEx is creating a new kind of information work space for the knowledge worker that allows them to build business mashups with the collaboration applications that we provide and the business applications provided by other suppliers.