Cisco Collaboration Summit - New Social Software Tools
I spent a few days in San Francisco at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. John Chambers, as always, did an amazing job of positioning Cisco as a leader and innovator. I totally agreed with Chambers when he said that the technology for collaboration is the easy party, but changing a company’s culture is hard, and it’s especially hard to change the way people work. He noted that collaboration needs to be driven from the top down to match a company’s business goals. It also leads to new business models, such as how to respond to a hurricane, or how you move operations to the data center.
Jim Grubb, Demo Master, demonstrated the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP), which lets users create and share social content and expertise. ECP brings together people, information, and communities in an integrated collaboration experience. Customers will have to wait for this, however, since ECP is just going into beta trial today with some key accounts.
Here’s the basic idea behind ECP. Similar to IBM’s Lotus Connections and products from smaller Enterprise 2.0 companies like Socialtext, ECP is a social software portal application that lets users form team spaces and communities of interest where they can search for individuals with specific expertise, share information, and collaborate and communicate. As Grubb demonstrated, communities can be dynamically created based on a project, for example, and people and resources can be brought into the community quickly and easily. Based on tags and other criteria, users can search for individuals based on skills or expertise and bring them into the community. Using Cisco’s UC tools, users can integrate real-time voice and video capabilities, and send IM’s, initiate real-time voice and/or video calls using click-to-call capabilities. They can also invite other people to join the discussion. Community members can share blogs, wikis, videos, documents, and other information within the shared community workspace.
Cisco acknowledges that other vendors have similar social software tools, and they’re not the first ones in this area. However, there is a gestalt that occurs when ECP can be integrated with Cisco’s UC tools, allowing for a richer collaborative experience, with real-time voice, video, and chat capabilities.
Great summary, Blair, as always.
On the “gestalt” point, I think that’s been one of the key points in IBM’s demos of both Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections using the tools of Sametime pretty much since Lotusphere of 2006. We’ve since seen the power of the full suite of communications tools touted by IBM customers such as Colgate Palmolive and Rheinmettal, including location awareness, tagged searches, and more, powered by IM, presence, and click-to-communicate (voice call, share desktop, and/or video call).
That announcement was memorable, in part, since IBM announced the product both live at Lotusphere and on Second Life.
I think Cisco is wise to morph their product line, though they will have to play catch up in this market, and in competition with some pretty well-positioned players, not just the PBX vendors.
As always, we’ll be watching and observing the evolution.
Marty Parker
Marty: I agree that Cisco will have to play catch up, espcially to IBM. But based on the demos I saw, they have a very significant offering that will be very appealing to their customers.
I cannot understand why this seems to get a great deal of interest when SharePoint 2010 has this sort of capability?
Is it that SharePoint is seen as being too complex to implement?
SharePoint 2010 with the integration with Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2007 R2 offers click to call, click to Im, presence, click to email etc.
Tim:
Thanks for your comment. SharePoint has most of the collaboration capabilities I discussed, but not the social media capabilities that IBM and Cisco offer at this time. I’m sure Microsoft will add social media functionality in the near future, but they don’t have comparable offerings right now.