If Unified Communications Could be Fun - Cius Demo at Ciscolive
Last week in Las Vegas I got to follow up on Cisco’s contact center analyst day by attending Ciscolive, which is Cisco’s big customer event, co-located with C-Scape, Cisco’s main analyst event. Ciscolive was huge! In the main keynote there were 12,500 customers, a lot of analysts, and 23K total attendees if you include those participating virtually. As usual, John Chambers was completely engaging speaking on the vision that Cisco has with snippets such as, “Economies of the future won’t be information economies, but network economies”, and “Every mistake I’ve made as a leader is in being too slow or in having speed without process and being replicable.”
Ciscolive also had what Cisco called, ‘The World of Solutions Expo’, which was essentially a trade show of Cisco and Cisco partners. In the collaboration area we got to see and hear much more about UC and collaboration products, such as Cisco Pulse, and I was happy to hear that Cisco has come a long way in getting the answers to some of the questions I had last November when they announced those products.
The best part of the keynote was the Cius demonstration; Cisco’s new tablet phone. Aimed at a business user, rather than consumer, like Apple’s iPad, this UC tool, is nice. This telephone/tablet combination acts as a portable communications and collaboration platform, working as a phone with a screen that works with Cisco applications such as Telepresence or WebEx, and with Cisco’s Unified Communications manager, or as a tablet. When the tablet is docked it provides the screen, and the base has USB ports, a wired Ethernet connection, and, of course, a telephone handset and speakerphone.
When used as a tablet, Cius has an HD 720p camera that faces the user, and a 5 megapixel camera mounted on the back, so that a user can pop the tablet off of the base, and use it for two way video calls, or video calls in which the user can see the other party and show them whatever the back camera is pointed at.
The Cius tablet weighs 1.14 pounds, runs on the Android operating system, and supports 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and 3G. Later releases will include 4G mobile networking. Cius is blue-tooth enabled, and supports connection of other headsets through a micro-USB port. Cisco said that when the product is released in early 2011 that it will come with a set of applications and a Firefox browser, but also stated that Android developers can write applications to the device using Cisco’s own SDK and APIs. Cisco also claims that the tablet has an 8 hour battery life.
If a unified communications “phone” could be fun, this would be it. It has a nice design, supports a lot of functionality, and appears very easy to use. For Cisco, the Cius is also a very attractive add-on to their shameless drive to put video everywhere, not only because of the video capabilities of the phone, but also because of support for Cisco’s myriad video-enabled UC applications. There is no hidden agenda here; just video everywhere all the time, and this makes video appealingly mobile.
Lastly, although the Cius is positioned as a business device, with Cisco’s statements towards bringing the network to everyone, it’s not out of the question that further positioning towards the consumer market might happen not far down the road.
Nancy, in your introduction you briefly touched on collaboration products like Cisco pulse. This concept is fascinating as it transforms organisations from a ’static’ photoshot view to realtime, wired and evolving community. Although the concept is powerful, Cisco seems to be slow in exposing it to the market, at least in Europe, so questions that rose when the product was first announced last year still are in clouds. I wonder what your impression is after attending Cisco Live.
Joris,
I don’t think it is that Cisco was slow exposing it to the market, but more that Pulse was part of 60 UC and collboration products they announced en masse last November, and the product wasn’t finished. Even though Cisco has Pulse on the list of products that have finally hit GA, it is still a work in progress.
Having said that, in the demo area for collaboration at Ciscolive many of the questions I had at announcement were answered. For example, Cisco has refined the rules around policy and privacy for Pulse. My first thought in November was “are they going to tag everything that I look at, read, watch, say, blog….”. No. Tagging of subjects is opt in. Groups, managers, etc. can make up a list of key words for Pulse to monitor, but it is up to the user to say yes or no to accepting the tag, or saying that a particular tag is a competency, etc.
There were a lot of questions like that I had that 7 months after announcement they had figured out. It is worth contacting Cisco to get questions like that answered.