Cisco sees enterprise collaboration as a $45 billion market and it’s going once it with a vengeance.
It announced a trio of latest merchandise these days that shows how it’s on a headlong collision course with Microsoft’s collaboration merchandise, Lync and Skype.
Next quarter, Cisco can bring Jabber to Windows and also the iPad for the primary time.
Jabber may be a competitor to Lync. it isn’t for customers however is deployed to enterprise staff to allow them to communicate via video, voice, presence, instant messaging, or internet conferencing. Jabber was previously offered for the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android, together with Cisco’s own Android pill, the Cius.
Last summer Cisco bought Versly, a startup that created a plug-in for Microsoft workplace applications, and also the new Jabber Windows software is that the fruit of that. With Versly, Cisco thinks that its collaboration tool will compete with Lync even for Microsoft workplace users.
Cisco used this announcement to entails that its merchandise support a video commonplace, so that they work with merchandise from rival Polycom. Cisco says that Skype will such a poor job of supporting the H.264 video commonplace that its merchandise cannot work with Skype.
That’s a bit skewed, though. Skype has been supporting H.264 on the iPhone for a few year currently. thus technically, Skype on the iPhone ought to work with Cisco’s videoconferencing wares.
The bigger issue here is that Microsoft has very little incentive to figure directly with Cisco to ascertain that Skype works with Cisco’s wares. Microsoft and Cisco are competing head to move for the enterprise.
If Microsoft ever gets its act along and integrates Lync with Skype — because it has been promising — the advantage lies with Microsoft. Lync are able to reach all those Skype customers — and Cisco won’t.
Cisco additionally announced an update to the TX9000 family, a high-end, three-screen video conferencing unit that prices $299,000 a pop. The TX9000 family additionally works with Jabber and Cisco’s alternative collaboration tools, Webex (its cloud internet conferencing service) and Quad (its microblogging/address book tool).