Cisco Systems earlier today announced numerous product offers and solutions in support of its collaboration vision that span across several functional areas:

* Conferencing
* Customer care
* Enterprise social software
* IP communications
* Messaging
* Mobile applications
* Telepresence

The following diagram illustrates the Cisco Collaboration Architecture concept, including the foundation on which the above communication application functions reside:

Many of the launch offerings were designed and developed to enhance pre-existing Cisco Collaboration Solutions, such as Unified Communications Manager (UCM) and WebEx, but a few take the company in new directions, such as hosted email and enterprise social networking.

Elements of Cisco Collaboration Strategy
Before discussing details of the launch it may be beneficial to provide a framework to better evaluate the role each new product/service brings to the Cisco Collaborations Solution portfolio. Cisco has identified five key elements for its collaboration strategy:

1. The belief that collaboration is moving from text and document-centric, to communications and people centric. Central to this belief is the role of video as a transformative element that will become as easy to use as documents are today in terms of creation, publishing, and repurpose. Cisco also believes that the current IP communications network is not sufficient to support the video needs of tomorrow.

2. Cisco Medianet, an intelligent network optimized for rich media, will enable the pervasive and scalable use of video.

3. Medianet will enable a more personal, interactive and social experience by making the technology media aware, endpoint aware and network aware.

4. The network will be used to format video and all media to best match the characteristics and the limitations of a user's specific situation.

5. Medianet goes beyond quality of service to focus on quality of experience

Cisco announced its "medianet" strategy and concept late last year. It included a new suite of technologies designed for advanced communications, collaboration and entertainment through video and rich media-optimized service provider, business and home networks. The need for a medianet is driven by Cisco's belief that video and rich media will represent 90% of total network traffic. Several of today's announcements are highly or partially focused on video, including new IP phone, telepresence, and social networking offers. Cisco's recent Tandberg acquisition announcement further underscored the company's evolving strategic focus on a communications medium that demands higher bandwidth and more applications-focused networks.

All of the Cisco Collaboration Solutions offers contribute towards achieving a set of objectives: Build trust and accelerate decisions with rich, real-time Interactions; connect the right people with the right information; accelerate team performance; collaborate with confidence across companies; and optimize IT investments. In this context, according to John Chambers, CEO, Cisco, "collaboration will affect every industry. It will change service, sales, and business models. It will change the size, scope, and number of projects a company can take on. And it will change the speed of implementation." According to Cisco, companies that create a culture of collaboration will move ideas instead of people, reduce travel without sacrificing personal connections, improve decision making speed, work in environmentally sustainable ways, and increase productivity on a global scale.

What I particularly like about the Cisco launch is that the overused term Unified Communications (UC) is not used to describe or categorize any one product or service. It's a given that virtually all offers from the same designer and developer should be "unified" in the sense of connectivity and/or interoperability, and several new Cisco offers also help "unify" communications and collaboration solutions across multi-vendor networks and endpoints. Collaboration has a greater sense of meaning to customers that UC does not, an important marketing objective most purveyors of so-called UC solutions sometimes forget. "Communications and collaboration" is a cleaner and more descriptive term of what customers need and want to do. Unify is a more technical term that individual system subscribers care little about when performing everyday work tasks. A subscriber is more apt to say he/she requires communications or collaboration with other subscribers, but few (if any) would ever say they need to "unify."

Cisco Strategic Direction for Collaboration
The Cisco strategic direction for collaboration has the following key elements as illustrated in the following chart:

Underlying Cisco's strategic direction, according to the company, is the belief that collaboration has been moving from text and document-centric to communications and people centric. In today's environment where meeting participants are likely to be dispersed across many locations, video is the optimal way to communicate, if a medianet is available to support the technical requirements. Video as a transformative element, as cited previously, is central to the communications and collaboration experience, as is the role of a medianet. Videoconferencing in the past has been used selectively and sparingly, mainly due to infrastructure/services costs, difficulty implementing and managing, and lack of integration with other communications and collaboration processes, but today's video market is characterized by rapidly declining costs, easier to use and manage systems, and interoperability with other communications/collaboration tools.

The rapid growth of social networking is also quickly changing how individuals interact, Cisco observes. In the world of business, social networking can tear down the barriers and rigidly structured silos that traditionally isolated individuals from each other to give way to more fluid, ad-hoc communities. More projects will be performed by "clusters of experts" and these groups can be formed dynamically to achieve a shared outcome, according to the company. The self-organizing cycle will continually repeat itself as needed. It is a more efficient and agile process to produce faster results, since experts are drawn to projects rather than assigned top down. Experts will be identified by tagging their network activities, e.g. applications enabled or websites visited. Cisco envisions Enterprise Social Software as the means to enable this type of new work environment. Although social networking in the consumer world has become the fourth most popular online activity, even passing personal email, it has evolved very slowly in the business world. Cisco has identified four key requirements to increase acceptance in the business world: security, availability, quality of service, and reliability. In time, social networking will dramatically change the way business people work and interact.

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