Cisco's Quad collaboration platform sure sounds a lot like U.C.
Cisco Systems today announced the coming new Cisco Quad enterprise collaboration platform and after viewing a demo of it a few days ago, I found the similarities between it and Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform to be readily apparent, begging the question of whether Quad is intended to integrate with UC or compete with it.
At Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose, I sat in on my first TelePresence session, connected to Cisco officials in San Francisco and other reporters and analysts in Boston, New York and Toronto. We watched a demo of Quad’s capabilities and quizzed the Cisco people.
Cisco Quad, available in the U.S. and a handful of other countries later this year, will combine video, voice, other data and social networking features into one collaboration platform. The system enables people to search for data and access people and expertise across their enterprise’s network. It also incorporates Cisco WebEx video conference system, from a 2007 acquisition, and will soon enable mobile workers to access the system on Apple’s iPhone and iPad devices. It also features Cisco technology to capture video and share it through a service called Cisco Show and Share, which it describes as a “social video system.”
But because Cisco Quad also offers e-mail, instant messaging and other communications and collaboration tools, it duplicates the functionality of U.C. True, says Cisco, but the idea is to give customers a choice of whether or how to use Cisco’s features or a mix of Cisco and Microsoft features.
“In Unified Communications there is voice, video, e-mail and instant messaging … and we now offer features in all those areas,” said Mirali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Collaboration Platform business unit at Cisco. So you can buy Cisco instead of Microsoft.
But at the same time, Sitaram continued, Cisco understands that there’s a lot of Microsoft already running at most enterprises and knows customers want to protect that investment. So Cisco Quad is designed to easily integrate with UC and other communication and collaboration systems. Specifically, Quad is an open platform designed to play well with Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, Active Director and FAST Search and Transfer, Microsoft’s enterprise search engine, which it acquired in 2008.
All the different components of Quad can be sold separately, Sitaram explained. “You can get the instant messaging separately, you can buy the meetings experience separately, you can buy the phone … capabilities separately or you can buy them all in one experience with Cisco Quad around it.”
It’s a situation countless other tech companies face in pushing their technology, but at the same time understanding that it has to plug into whatever systems the customer is already using.
“If you look at the history of this space, we’re the Switzerland of these companies,” said Paul Fulton, general manager of Cisco’s Prosumer business unit, which adapts consumer electronics devices to meet enterprise needs. Today, that unit also introduced the Flip MinoPRO camcorder, an enterprise version of its popular Flip camcorder for consumers.
“We want to make sure our customers have the ability to pull in the best of these products without needing to be locked in to a certain vendor,” Fulton said.
Of course, not being locked into a single vendor works both ways. It means a customer doesn’t have to throw out their Microsoft to install Cisco, but it also means Cisco can make a few inroads into that Microsoft shop and score at least a few Cisco sales.
To be sure, Cisco and Microsoft are becoming increasingly competitive in other areas, given news earlier this week about Microsoft’s alliance with Polycom, a competitor to Cisco in the telepresence space.
