A lot of fanfare has been made about Cisco Spark, the first application built upon the Cisco Cloud Collaboration Platform. However, focusing too much on Spark, even though it is a compelling application, misses the more profound implications of where Cisco is going with its cloud collaboration strategy, and how its decisions will impact our industry.
Much has been said about cloud services. There have been a variety of excellent write-ups about the Microsoft Office 365 cloud offering, which now includes Skype for Business, for example, and my industry colleagues have published articles on PureCloud, Interactive Intelligence's cloud play, and Circuit, which Unify positions as a "new way to work." What follows is an attempt to outline where Cisco is going with its Cloud Collaboration Platform initiative, and the implications therefrom.
Jonathan Rosenberg, VP and CTO of Collaboration at Cisco, concluded his discussion of the Cisco Cloud Collaboration Platform at this summer's Cisco Live 2015 by saying, "I hope you are a little excited, maybe a little scared, but hopefully more excited... great things to come." Indeed, many more things will come, and Spark is only the beginning.
Cisco has built its collaboration cloud upon four pillars: iteration, security, fusion, and ecosystem. I won't go into the details about what these mean as they have been covered elsewhere. Perhaps more useful is a graphic Cisco uses to discuss its Cloud Collaboration Platform:
A careful examination of this graphic is revealing. So far, we have been exposed only to the Spark application, which relies on the capabilities shown above. However, per Jonathan's comments and some made in public forums by Rowan Trollope, I think the "Future" box has a story to tell, and I will speculate on what may ultimately emerge. For an additional in-depth view of the Cisco Cloud Collaboration Platform, check out this Cisco Live Melbourne presentation. You will need a Cisco Live login to access it.).
It is my firm belief that in the coming months we will see other Cisco core functionality move into the collaboration cloud. Given that Cisco is the number one vendor of PBXs Cisco Unified Communications Manager, or CUCM), Web conferencing (WebEx), and video solutions, and that it is one of the top three vendors of contact center software, it is inevitable that Cisco would migrate some or all of these capabilities to its Cloud Collaboration Platform.
Notice that there is no reference to call control in the above graphic, and Spark really isn't using call control all that much in its present incarnation. However, consider what would happen if Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS)-like functionality showed up in the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. Since Cisco's HCS is based on one of the leading call managers, this level of call control capability in the Cisco Collaboration Cloud Platform would certainly compete favorably with Skype for Business, regardless of how much effort Microsoft puts into that UC platform.
Cisco has also been taking HCS down market since it was first released, meaning that the partners selling HCS are aiming at smaller-sized deployments than those originally targeted. A migration of even a portion of Cisco's UCM call control, will make Cisco's cloud offering one of the most feature-rich in the market. Plus, given the acceptance enterprises have for CUCM, migration to hybrid, premises-cloud offerings will likely become commonplace and relatively straightforward to implement.
Next, consider the Content Sharing box. Spark reveals a small amount of content sharing with a common document repository and searchable text conversations. With Cisco's ownership of the Web collaboration market, moving WebEx-like capabilities into the Cloud Collaboration Platform would again instantly make products and services built upon this cloud platform market-leading, as far as capabilities go.
Now, look at the Media/Transcoding box. Cisco is the largest provider of video products and services, and it leads Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for video conferencing. As Cisco moves its full video gateway and transcoding capabilities into the Cloud Collaboration Platform, users will have a fully featured suite of video capabilities available to them. This will include integration with Skype for Business via existing Cisco Collaboration Meeting Room capability as well as native integration with WebRTC-enabled browsers and mobile apps. Cisco already has the capability to integrate video from other standards-based video endpoints, so many of the issues with "incompatible video" will be immediately resolved via Cisco's cloud offering.
Finally, another box not shown, but one that could be added in the future, would be labeled, "Contact Center." Cisco already has a hosted version of its contact center, and moving all or part of this functionality to the Cisco Cloud Collaboration Platform would be a no-brainer.
Now, what makes all of this more compelling is that each of these applications and capabilities are being rewritten from the ground up so that they utilize the design principles and the integration capabilities built into the Cloud Collaboration Platform, including multi-tenancy. A major implication of this strategy, coupled with the Tropo acquisition, is that all of this functionality will be available to developers via Web interfaces, so that they can easily integrate any or all of the Cloud Collaboration Platform capabilities into almost any app they choose.
Cisco is taking a pragmatic approach to building the Cloud Collaboration Platform as well. If it can't build or buy a leading capability to add to the Cloud Collaboration Platform, it will license it. For example, Cisco has licensed Microsoft Exchange capabilities for calendar and some email integration needs. The company is also pragmatic with respect to other partners providing important and necessary functionality, such as document storage via Box and others; third-party providers of Internet of Things (IoT) functionality; data analytics; and so on.
My speculations lead me to conclude that Cisco has an ambitious and far-reaching vision of what its collaboration cloud can and will do. It is far broader than just PBX or Web conferencing or messaging or video or contact center. In one sense, UC brought together presence, IM, voice, Web collaboration, and video. Collaboration clouds, like the one Cisco is building, will bring together all of the capabilities of UC plus the contact center, IoT, big data, and analytics in a way that is easily consumed and easily integrated. Enterprise organizations, developers, and competitors should definitely pay close attention to what Cisco is doing with its Cloud Collaboration Platform.
