Cisco moving forward

You might have seen the news today from Cisco:

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_092408.html?POSITION=LINK&COUNTRY_SITE=us&CAMPAIGN=NewsAtCiscoLatestNewsfromCDCHP&CREATIVE=LINK1&REFERRING_SITE=CISCO.COMHOMEPAGE


But they just made a new set of announcements in the collaboration space.

I was going to make a post a few days ago..and as a blogger that discusses industry rumors, its interesting sometimes posting them. You can make your prediction or pass on the rumor and if it turns out right, you appear as the smarty pants in the room. If you miss it, you look like you're the dumbest. Well... I'll give you the rumor...even though it wasnt announced this week. (I still believe it will though).

The rumor is that Cisco is going to come out with a mid-priced video endpoint. It will be priced no more than a Polycom HDX and will be 1080P in quality. It will be a rack mount unit with a extneral camera and unlike all of the other Cisco telepresence systems, it will not ship with a monitor (the customer will supply their own). I havent been able to find info yet of whether or not Cisco developed this internally or used a partner. I do believe that it is NOT the same hardware architecture as the telepresence systems; i believe Cisco used its famous ability to get the price point of the hardware down so that they could crank these out at high margin to Cisco. (high margin to Cisco resellers is only dream... the typical Cisco reseller makes just 2% on the hardware)

So..thats the rumor... take it or leave it.

So...thoughts on the announcement they made. I would say...impressive... they are starting to tie together and putting on all the chrome they will need to compete with MS in this market. I found the announcement about Jabber pretty interesting as well:

http://blogs.cisco.com/ar/comments/cisco_to_acquire_jabber/

Of course all of us know the Jabber protocol as a fairly standard and widely used IM protocol. Its good to see these standards protocols being used. (although some would argue that SIP would be the better route)

The only thing I see missing is tighter integration to room system video.

But...one area that I was surprised to see was that Webex Connect is looking very much like Sharepoint. This is really interesting...not from a app perspective...more from a strategey perspective. Cisco is solidly jumping out of real time (synchronous) communications and moving into asynchronous communications. This is a point of demarcation really...and maybe the start of a new wider IT strategey for Cisco that moves them out of the Network or Telecom group in the sales cycle.