This morning Cisco launched a bunch of new products; I think the total count is somewhere in the neighborhood of 60. Cisco is also having a press and analyst day this week to update everyone on its vision and how all of these new products fit into it. Despite the fact that I think this should have been at VoiceCon, I do think there are some significant product announcements in here.To me, the product release that could have the most upside for Cisco is the WebEx Mail product. A year or so ago, Cisco quietly bought a small, web based e-mail company called PostPath and we haven't heard much from Cisco about this since then. I'm sure many people have looked at this and thought to themselves that Cisco has zero chance of capturing any of the e-mail market because it's a very mature market. I must admit that I do believe that share shift is extremely difficult in mature markets and despite this, I do think Cisco has a legitimate shot here.
Cisco's all about market transitions. That is, they look for markets that are undergoing some kind of change that creates a buying decision and they jump all over it. This is how the crazy thought that Cisco could actually sell phones went from Cisco being a long shot to Cisco being a market leader (although Avaya will soon buy that title). Cisco recognized the shift to VoIP would create another buying opportunity and they jumped all over it.
The software industry has been undergoing a transition of its own over the past few years and that's the shift to SaaS, and this transition has created new competitors in other software markets. Salesforce.com is an example of a company that managed to catch this shift in the CRM market, which has been undergoing this transition for the past several years.
The transition to SaaS is going to continue and e-mail is one of those markets that make much more sense to move to SaaS. With all of the regulatory requirements around e-mail retention and the continued increase in the size of e-mail attachments, it gets very hard for companies to manage their own e-mail servers, so why not push it to the cloud? The thing I really like about PostPath (now WebEx Mail) is that Cisco can deliver it without the user noticing the back end changed (except the user won't get mailbox full messages). WebEx Mail has full Outlook support, meaning the user can go along and use the software that they know and the IT department can shift the offer to the cloud without any business disruption. This is a significant advantage over gmail or other web based platforms. So, while Microsoft has been very actively touting its next wave of OCS that brings full PBX functionally, Cisco has been building its counter punch and will compete with the other empire in one of its strong markets.
For me, the other product that stood out above the rest of the announcements was the intercompany Telepresence capabilities. I've been a fairly loud video critic in the past and one of the big reasons is that video does not benefit from Metcalfe's Law. Metcalfe's Law states that the value of the network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on it. Now, there are lots of video nodes out there, but they're not connected nodes, which significantly reduces the value of the video network. In today's environment, if two people in different companies have Telepresence, they couldn't talk to one another without a significant amount of IT time being involved. This takes away all the spontaneity from the service and drives users to communicate over other tools. Now, I'm not saying that this will drive Telepresence into every organization but it will make it more valuable to those who have it and I'm sure Cisco will deliver this capability with other forms of videoconferencing (like with Tandberg) and that could finally drive video to being a collaboration tool use for b2b purposes.
Obviously with 60+ new products there was a lot more to the Cisco announcements than these two. The other things that I liked a lot were the social media tools like "Show and Share" which is Cisco's YouTube like product, and Pulse which is a people and media search tool. However, as I pointed out in a blog last week, I would like to see more companies leverage the tools that consumers are already using (like Siemens did with Twitter) rather than creating new versions. However, I can see the difficulty of doing that with a product where users need to store company information.
The one part of the launch that I wasn't crazy about were the video phones. Polycom showed me their new videophones at VoiceCon and I had a similar tepid reaction. If I'm sitting at my desk and want to reach out to someone over video, I would prefer to do it on my PC, not my phone. The angle of the video phone means that if I'm looking at my screen the camera is shooting up my nose, not exactly where I want the focus to be. Now, Polycom's do adjust so you can raise the screen so it's even with your PC, but still, why not just use the PC? There are some niche cases where video phones do work, like hotel lobbies, etc so I see the use cases remaining limited.
Overall though, I do think the announcements today are significant. They move Cisco into new markets and create a few opportunities in markets that can move the needle for a company the size of Cisco.
