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Should Cisco Compete with IBM for Second-Place in the Desktop Market?

By Eric Krapf, Editor | Jan 18, 2008 | No comments yet ...

We've posted a new feature over in the right-hand column, by Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research. In mid-2007, Brent and Wainhouse did a pretty thorough survey of end user attitudes about Unified Communications, and the results were pretty revealing. Among other things, it supports the notion that Siemens--and almost everyone who's not Microsoft or (to a lesser degree) IBM--is going to lose the desktop battle. Yet it also makes me wonder if Cisco isn't an exception to this rule.I posted about this a couple of days ago, after doing a podcast interview with Mark Straton of Siemens. Mark played down OpenScape, Siemens' UC client, while playing up HiPath 8000, the company's carrier-grade core call control engine. If you look at Figure 2 in Brent's article, you'll see why this is the right move:

As the figure shows, very few enterprises in Wainhouse's survey were using or considering any UC client other than Microsoft's or IBM's. For most of the voice platform vendors, close to half or more of the respondents were actively "not considering" these vendors' UC clients.

What's interesting is that this data doesn't look nearly as bad for Cisco, which scored 40% on the "not considering" line, and a total of 35% either using or considering its UC client. That actually compares not too badly with Microsoft OCS 2007, where 48% are using or considering, and 26% are "not considering." And it compares really well with Lotus, where 24% are using or considering Sametime and 27% are using or considering Notes--versus 51% and 56% respectively who aren't considering Lotus.

Things look even better for Cisco when you consider that presumably a chunk of those who are "not considering" Cisco clients aren't Cisco Unified Communications Manager shops anyway, so they really wouldn't be candidates for the UC client.

It almost makes me wonder if Cisco should make a bid to replace Lotus as the desktop alternative to Microsoft. Unlike IBM, they have an installed base of IP-PBX customers who'd be natural adopters for their client.

Maybe Cisco is the one "voice" vendor that shouldn't concede the desktop.

And, maybe that's why we keep hearing those rumors about IBM buying Siemens Enterprise....

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