I just attended Cisco’s annual summit for analysts, consultants and partners, which highlighted this year’s achievements. While there was little new with its core collaboration portfolio, Cisco emphasized its accomplishments in implementing and executing on its strategy to deliver its broad suite of collaboration solutions to its customers. Cisco made a lot of progress in integrating its voice, video, WebEx and social products and making the user experience across its portfolio simpler to use and easier to maintain.
There was a good discussion with analysts and consultants on how to help customers better identify the business value of its social business strategy. Validating the ROI for collaboration investments is essential to grow this business. This is similar to the issue that vendors and service providers faced when introducing unified communications several years ago. The challenge will be to direct its sales channel to expand its marketing efforts beyond the IT department and into business units and clearly demonstrate how social business improves business processes and agility.
Cisco has made several advancements to deliver an integrated offering to its customers. Among this year’s announcements that highlights its integration efforts was the single unified client for voice and video that supports multiple endpoints and results in a simplified user experience. Additionally, Its WebEx product now offers an integrated solution for conferencing, instant messaging, telepresence and social, which can be delivered either as a premise or cloud solution. These integration efforts, as well as the move to the cloud, are important steps to engage the next generation workforce that is highly mobile and social. Several customers spoke convincingly on the benefits for implementing its collaboration solutions to reduce costs and increase employee productivity.
A wonderful locknote speech by Dir. Michio Kaku, a renowned physicist and futurist reminded us all that we are in for profound changes in technology and to be ready for the ride. Cisco has done well in marketing itself as a company that embraces the future while delivering quality support to its existing customers. With formidable competitors such as Microsoft, Google and IBM also trying to capture leadership in social business, Cisco needs to continue to clearly differentiate its value, business relevance and capabilities in this space as it goes forward.