Late last week a lot of Cisco competitors, industry pundits, and armchair product managers issued a steady stream of I Told You So's as Cisco pulled the plug on its Cius tablet. But I'm not ashamed to admit it: I'm sorry to see the demise of Cius. I thought it was a fabulous product. Not as a consumer tablet, but as an IP end point. And here's why.
All too often Cius was referred to as a tablet that happened to be engineered to support voice and video communications particularly well in business settings. And this, so goes the popular wisdom, was why it failed: Cisco tried to outdo Apple with a more expensive but ultimately less flexible device.
The problem is, this isn't what Cius was.* Cius was an IP endpoint that registered to a Cisco PBX, just like any of Cisco's IP phones. Cius was optimized to provide business communications in a campus setting over Wi-Fi, just like Cisco's Wi-Fi phones, except Cius could do video as well. Cius (via its docking station) was a VDI terminal, just like Cisco's VXC 6000. Oh, and it could run apps--Cisco apps, partners' apps, Android apps. Cius wasn't a tablet that happened to be engineered to support business-grade voice and video communications. It was an IP endpoint that happened to run apps.
When Cisco first announced Cius, back in June 2010, this was a differentiator. At that point the first generation of Apple's iPad had only been shipping for a couple months. Granted, the general derision that first met Apple's announcement of a tablet had already quieted in the face of 300,000 units selling on the first day it was released, then sales registering in the millions within a matter of weeks. But the first iPad had no camera, so video conferencing was out of the question. It couldn't even be used to place phone calls. For the user wanting a tablet that could double as a phone and video conferencing device, Cius was everything iPad wasn't in 2010. But then came 2011. iPad 2, with its cameras, faster processor, and ability to support real-time communications apps, was released in March. Cius would not become generally available until July. Six months later Cisco reported that more than 1,100 companies purchased Cius devices, "with some buying thousands of units." But by this time iPad 2 sales numbered in the millions, and the device could clearly serve as a platform for real-time communications applications in a way the first generation of iPads could not.
Next page: Implications for IP endpoints
Throughout this time, Cisco marketing rallied around the message that Cius was not in fact a consumer tablet, but rather a business communications tool. I've always felt this was a valid point. Cius supported voice over Wi-Fi, like a few other Cisco phones can. It supported video telephony, like a few other Cisco phones can. It could run third-party applications, like other Cisco phones can when it comes to XML apps and like other UC vendors have been toying around with for their phones when it comes to Android apps. What was so interesting about Cius was it could do all of that--voice, video, mobility, apps, full connectivity to a business's communications infrastructure--all in one device. Cisco competitors--the very same ones crowing about Cius's demise--have nothing like it in their portfolios of IP end points. And perhaps they never will. Because if an industry leader like Cisco couldn't push the envelope and stir up the stagnant market (apologies for the mixed metaphor) for IP endpoints, I'm not sure who else can.
And that's my main concern here. If a product as innovative as Cius couldn't stand up to the BYOD phenomenon, is there really much hope for desk phone innovation? Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, and Avaya all have all introduced some interesting designs in the past year or so. But they all deliver a subset of the features that Cisco Cius did, and they suffer from some of the same issues that led to Cius's untimely demise. These issues include being incredibly expensive, having a very limited installed base, and being on a much slower development cycle compared to consumer devices that are taking an increasingly prominent role in the enterprise. If innovative desk phones like these can't establish themselves on the market at a price point businesses are willing to pay, then I fear it's likely that desk phones will continue to be marginalized. This might not be much of a problem to end users, who will simply shift to soft client-headset combos (as Microsoft is so keen to see happen) or to mobile phones (as the BYOD trend is steering us toward). But it will be a problem to UC solution vendors that--even if they like to style themselves as software developers--still derive a substantial amount of their product revenue from the sale of desk phones.
This is to say, it seems to me that the demise of Cisco Cius is less of a victory for Apple in the tablet market and more a defeat for business communications solution developers in the UC market.
* I realize my use of the past tense is premature, technically speaking. Cius remains a product that Cisco "will continue to offer Cius in a limited fashion." But with the company no longer investing in its ongoing development, Cius is dead in the water, so I think the past tense is warranted.
