Earlier this week, I had a chance to talk with Steve Slattery, VP/GM of Cisco's Voice Technology Group. Our conversation was pretty open-ended, but three issues dominated:
Tablets/Consumerization of IT
The issue of the week, of course, was tablets, and Steve said of Cisco's recently-announced, soon-to-be-released Cius tablet, "I've been building products for 25 years, and I've never seena product generate so much interest." He said Cisco has had 500 requests for trials.
When I asked Steve why enterprises should implement dedicated business-focused tablets instead of allowing or even facilitating employee use of iPads or other consumer tablets, he focused in primarily on issues of security and control. Unlike cellular phones/smartphones, where the horse is pretty much already out of the barn, CIOs still have a window of opportunity to proactively determine what kind of device their tablet-candidate users will have, and they can get that device into users' hands, thereby keeping control of the security and compliance issues that become more difficult if the user is using her own personal tablet.
Slattery also said he believes the opportunity for tablets as a primary computing device in the enterprise are huge. He cited a large financial institution whose CIO told him that the company was planning to replace 200,000 PCs in the next couple of years, and will likely deploy virtualized desktops in their place. Tablets are an ideal endpoint for such virtualized desktops, accompanied with USB- or Bluetooth-connected keyboards or other docking arrangements where needed, Steve said.
When I asked Steve about the impact of IT consumerization on deskphone revenues at Cisco, he acknowledged that some customers have told him that the phones they're purchasing now will be the last ones they do buy. Yet at the same time, he pointed out that Cisco has been reporting great sales figures for its IP phones.
Hosted/Cloud Communications
Here's the number to watch: Steve Slattery said Cisco expects hosted solutions to represent 30% of the communications market in 3-4 years. That's a long way from the cloud taking over, but it's triple the market share that Centrex typically achieved.
One of the major drivers, at least on the supplier side, will be the carriers. "Interest there is surprising and overwhelming from the large carriers around the world," Slattery said.
Large carriers (and large vendors) will be the choice for many enterprises that want hybrid solutions in which some sites or pieces of the solution run on-prem and others run in the cloud, Slattery said. Having this kind of consistency on the back end will be important for such hybrid deployments, he maintained. (Allan Sulkin did a full writeup on the Cisco Hosted Collaboration model when it was released earlier this year.)
From the customer perspective, Steve Slattery said adoption of hosted solutions will be driven by TCO and other economic considerations, as well as the need to keep current on rapidly-changing technologies.
Competing with Microsoft
I asked Steve Slattery what he expected to see as Microsoft rolls out the newly-renamed Lync (formerly OCS), now that Microsoft is positioning the product as a true PBX replacement. Like most vendor execs, he was reluctant to go into a great deal of detail in talking about a competitor, but he did say, "We're not losing business to them."
"We'll wait and see the real meat of what 14 [Lync's beta code name] is when it comes out," Slattery said.
Interoperability
Finally, I asked Steve about the issue of Interoperability in Unified Communications, and he responded by focusing mainly on a Cisco product, the Intercompany Multimedia Engine (IME). IME uses the PSTN to initially set up calls but also to store routing information generated by those PSTN calls that can be used to route future calls to the same recipient over the Internet. If every service provider and enterprise were using IME's underlying technology, public network traffic could quickly migrate off the PSTN and to the Internet. Realizing that the supporting technology would never gain ubiquitous deployment if it remained a Cisco-only offering, Cisco has submitted the technology to IETF for standardization.
But there hasn't been much indication from other vendors that they'd adopt the technology, dubbed ViPR (Verification involving PSTN Reachability), even as an IETF-standardized technology.
So I asked Steve Slattery: Whether we're talking IME or the UC Interoperability Forum, which Microsoft and Polycom founded and Avaya and Cisco have shunned--is interoperability really likely to happen? And for that matter, is it even in Cisco's interest, given its market leadership position?
Not surprisingly, he replied that Cisco does believe in interoperability, and he said Cisco has worked to open up its proprietary-SIP extensions to other players, as an example of an area where Cisco is taking action on interoperability.
Conclusion
We'll hear more from Cisco on all these topics, in a big way, when the company holds its Collaboration Summit in November. Last year, Cisco announced no fewer than 60 new products at the Collaboration Summit; no indication yet on whether the 2010 event will surpass that number or scale it back.
