In today's podcast, part of an ongoing series focusing on intellectual property and the cloud, Guy speaks with Tod Famous, director of product management at Cisco. The two discuss Cisco's Finesse solution, a cloud-based platform for developers, as well as how the cloud continues to change the dynamics of how enterprises employ intellectual property for innovation.
Speaking about Cisco Finesse previously, Tod said that for its design, Cisco was moving from a client/server technology to a browser-based agent and supervisor experience. Top of mind, during this process, was how to incorporate websites or cloud content in that agent experience, he said.
"We've created a market for developers where there was no such market, different from the way that traditional software would have been developed and distributed," Tod said in the podcast.
Cisco used a technology called OpenSocial in the Finesse architecture, which allows the "Finesse Container" to incorporate gadgets from other Web services, Tod explained.
"The Web developer can present a gadget through the Internet and it's simply a matter of configuration to turn on that gadget," Tod said. "There's no installation process, there's no security review that you would typically see with a piece of client software; yet the agent is getting the benefit of an application that comes from potentially multiple vendors across the Internet."
This also makes it easier for smaller companies to participate. Tod gave an example of one more niche developer, 2Ring, which creates wrap-up gadgets for contact center environments.
"It would not have been an application that would have been significant enough to warrant the installation of a client," Tod said, "but when it is presented as a gadget from this vendor, it can be incorporated into the Finesse desktop and they have a market for their software."
Guy and Tod discussed how the evolution of application-mapping services factors into Cisco Finesse, as well as how Web-based architectures have changed the developer resource pool. Be sure to listen to the entire podcast and check out previous episodes in Guy's cloud series.
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