Cisco used the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston today to announce a re-branding of its enterprise social platform, Quad, which will now take the name WebEx Social. Beyond the name change come some key new features to Quad, most notably, greater integration with Microsoft Office and Outlook.
The integration with Office "will empower workers using Word, PowerPoint or Excel to jointly edit and post updated documents, presentations and spreadsheets back to WebEx Social," Cisco stated in its release. The email integration lets users stay in their email client (including but not limited to Outlook) as they create and post updates to WebEx Social.
(Dave Michels interviewed Cisco's lead for Quad/WebEx Social, Murali Sitaram, earlier this year. That No Jitter interview can be found here.
The Microsoft-Cisco WebEx Social integration is the latest development in the ongoing back-and-forth between Microsoft and Cisco to capture end user mind share and eyeballs in the battle for the enterprise collaboration desktop (though "desktop" is something of an outdated term, since the latest WebEx Social and most other enterprise collaboration clients are increasingly running on tablets and smartphones as well as PCs).
Cisco has sparred with Microsoft in the IM/client space, recently announcing it would give away the basic version of its Jabber client--i.e., eliminate license fees--for customers of the core Cisco Unified Communications Manager platform. That positions Jabber as a challenge to the Microsoft Lync client, which has tended to enter the enterprise via its IM functionality.
Microsoft, for its part, has been attacking Cisco's core incumbency in communications, by pushing its full Lync platform as a PBX replacement (or, alternatively, arguing that you don't need to replace your existing PBX to deliver UC to your users).
The battle for the social aspect of enterprise collaboration could heat up even further if Microsoft goes through with a much-rumored acquisition of Yammer, an enterprise social networking firm that claims 200,000 companies worldwide as customers.
At the same time that Cisco and Microsoft battle each other, the WebEx Social announcement shows that the two have to be able to demonstrate some level of integration and interoperation, since both companies are strategic vendors for most large enterprises.
Finally, speaking of name changes, the Enterprise 2.0 event (which is owned by UBM TechWeb, which also owns No Jitter and Enterprise Connect) announced today that it's changing its name to E2; its spring Boston event will be known as E2 Social, and its fall Santa Clara event will be E2 Innovate. More information is available here.
