Among the highlights are announcement of a new UC client and a price cut for the Cius, along with predictions on the coming video boom.
In his keynote address on Tuesday of Enterprise Connect, Barry O'Sullivan, Senior VP, Voice Technology Group at Cisco, highlighted Cisco's position that video is the new voice, and made some announcements around endpoints and clients that support Cisco's Unified Communications positioning as the industry moves forward.
The newest news was the announcement of Cisco Jabber, a new UC client that unifies presence, IM, voice, video, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing. As the picture here shows, it much more closely resembles Microsoft Lync than Avaya Flare, but this is certainly a proven interface form factor for these communications functions. Keeping the name of Jabber probably makes a lot of tech cognoscenti happy, since Jabber was a well-regarded IM product that Cisco acquired as part of its ongoing UC strategy. The Jabber client also features screen sharing capability that Cisco ported over from WebEx.
To me, the other really significant announcement wasn't a new product, but a new price point for an already-announced product, the much-anticipated Cius tablet. At its original price point of $1,000, Cius was considerably more expensive than the iPad, but O'Sullivan announced on Tuesday that cisco was cutting the Cius street price to less than $700. Realistically, Cisco (and Avaya and RIM and any other company that comes up with a tablet) is competing with the iPad within the enterprise--however much network managers may struggle to get a handle on iPad usage and management among their users. So the price had to come down.
O'Sullivan said Cisco was seeing "unbelievable demand for the device," and added that with the price cut, "We want to make this the default choice." And he predicted that a year from now, Cius would be Cisco's best-selling device.
When it came time for demos, O'Sullivan brought out John Hernandez, who showed a contact center station that consisted of only a monitor--no PC. The station was running desktop virtualization, optimized for real-time media with Cisco's Virtualized Experience Infrastructure (VXI).
Social networking played a role in this and the next demo, with O'Sullivan and Hernandez showing off a social networking screen pop at the contact center station, based on Cisco Social Miner, which is a finalist for the Best in Enterprise Connect award (winner to be announced Wednesday morning). They also demoed a virtualized application running on the Cius tablet (see below).
O'Sullivan framed his keynote by talking about the communication industry as making major leaps ahead in five-year increments. In 2001, it was the debut of VOIP; in 2006, the emergence of UC--i.e., voice, messaging and conferencing into a single architecture. 2011 finds us at the dawn of the "post-PC world," and by 2016, O'Sullivan predicted, video will be ubiquitous, with codecs embedded natively in web browsers and wireless speeds growing by orders of magnitude and thus able to carry mobile video with sufficient quality as well.
