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Unraveling Cisco's Plans for umi

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion about the effect that Cisco’s recent corporate- and portfolio-level changes have had on umi, and role the company expects it to play in business environments. To track down the source of the confusion we really need look no further than Tasman Drive. The press release announcing Cisco’s restructuring seemed written to intentionally obfuscate umi’s positioning. It stated that "Cisco will...integrate Cisco umi into the company's Business TelePresence product line and operate through an enterprise and service provider go-to-market model, consistent with existing business TelePresence efforts." To be perfectly honest, when the announcement was made I couldn't make heads or tails of this. In what sense was umi being integrated into Cisco's business-focused telepresence portfolio? Did it mean umi would be sold solely as a video conferencing solution for businesses, not consumers? Or would it still be sold to consumers, but the product would simply reside in a different business unit? Or was it now targeted at both businesses and consumers? Cisco wasn't providing further comment. Maybe they didn't themselves have the answers at the time.

And I couldn't rely on blogs and the trade press, since there was no consensus on umi's fate. Some talked about umi in past tense, implying that nails had been firmly driven into its coffin: "Umi...had no chance against the free alternatives offered by Skype, Apple, or Google, or even lower-priced offerings from Logitech."

This echoed a statement often reposted in the blogosphere: "Cisco announced plans get out of the consumer business apart from its Linksys networking products, killing its Flip handheld camcorders, Eos social media platform and Umi consumer video conferencing device." (Emphasis added.) In some (but not all) cases the blog included a link to the original article, which describes Cisco as not actually "killing" umi, but having it "folded into the company's business plans"...which is no less vague than the Cisco press release.

At least one NoJitter commenter took this to mean "that Umi will be cut as a home consumer product and [is] likely to become a remote worker solution." This has actually been a very popular line of thinking:

* Some have suggested that Umi might be sold to businesses for use by home telecommuters."
* "Integration of umi with the 'existing telepresence efforts' holds the promise of...giving enterprises a system they can deploy in remote and home offices."
* "Selling Umi as a product for enterprises offers two possible future directions for the system. It could be a high-quality platform for telecommuters to stay connected with the business..."

Then there were the articles that continued to present umi as a consumer device, stating that Cisco's go-to-market strategy for it had changed. Representative of these: "Units would no longer be sold to consumers via retail." This was bolstered by Father's Day and buy-one-get-one-free deals that were offered after the Cisco restructuring announcement and that clearly advertised mi as a purely consumer product. Yet when I searched Best Buy and Amazon, umi clearly remained in their catalogs, so what were all these statements about umi not being sold through retailers any more?

To help clear things up I recently spoke with Mike Kisch, Cisco senior director of telepresence marketing (post-restructuring) and director of consumer marketing (pre-restructuring).

He explained that umi remains very much a consumer product. It is not positioned as business platform, at least not for telecommuters to use to set up video conferencing sessions with colleagues from their home offices. This is because umi was not developed to support multi-party conferencing, document sharing and other capabilities that information workers come to expect from their corporate collaboration and video conferencing tools. To reiterate: At this time Cisco does not anticipate umi functioning as a video end point off of a corporate TelePresence network, nor is it positioned as a solution for telecommuters.

This said, Cisco is in fact integrating umi with Cisco TelePresence systems. This is intended to support business-to-consumer applications, such as a medical facility leveraging its TelePresence systems to create point-to-point video channels to the homes of patients under their care. Cisco is exploring other B2C applications in the areas of education, financial services and personal fitness...anything that would benefit from one-on-one high-definition video communications channels. This B2C use of umi, which is currently being trialed by various Cisco customers, is apparently how the "Cisco will integrate umi into the Business TelePresence product line" statement in the corporate restructuring press release was meant to be interpreted.

To decode the "operate through an enterprise and service provider go-to-market model" part of the statement, Cisco is currently in a "phased migration" in how umi is being sold. Retail relationships with Best Buy and Amazon remain in place. However, going forward Cisco wants to rely more on service providers. Verizon is the first to sign up, with a umi service expected to be made generally available shortly and services from other non-US service providers to follow.

So that's what I've learned about the current positioning of mi. If you've heard otherwise or have anything to add, please leave a comment.

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