Cisco bets big on collaboration

CEO John Chambers said the key to enterprise success and economic productivity is the ability of people to work together and share information easily

Unveiling 61 new products and features for enterprise employees to communicate with each other and partners, Cisco Systems executives emphasized the importance of collaboration at an event in San Francisco on Monday.

Chairman and CEO John Chambers continued his mantra of the past few years that the key to both enterprise success and economic productivity is the ability of people to work together and share information easily. On Monday, Cisco had several new tools for those tasks, mostly for delivery within the next several months.

[ Keep up on the latest networking news with our Technology: Networking newsletter. ]

"This isn't a technology or product announcement today. This is an architectural announcement that enables change in business or government strategy at a much faster speed," Chambers told partners, analysts and media at the Cisco Collaboration Summit.

He underscored the importance of the company's broad set of introductions by tying it in to what he called an emerging recovery of the world economy.

"At a time that most people are just popping their head back up, saying it feels like the economy's starting to go again, what are we going to do? We're going to have the foot not only off the (brake) pedal, it is completely down on the accelerator, and we are going to go to the fastest and most aggressive we've ever done in the history of our company," Chambers said.  

The company's true overarching goal is to add value to its infrastructure offerings -- which now extend far beyond the routers and switches that initially built Cisco -- so they don't become generic products that are hard to charge a premium for, according to Ken Dulaney, Gartner's lead Cisco analyst.

"If they don't provide more value to the network, then they're open to attack from vendors who want to commoditize what they have," Dulaney said. "If all you want is a pipe from Point A to Point B, you're crazy to spend all this money on Cisco."

Speaking to reporters on Monday night, Chambers gave a similar message by making reference to China's biggest networking vendor. Cisco's strongest competitor in collaboration is Microsoft and in devices is Apple, he said. But in the big picture, "It's Huawei, Huawei and Huawei," Chambers said. The Chinese maker of wired and wireless infrastructure has used its relative cost advantage to make inroads in the developing world, though it has had less success so far in richer countries. Chambers also said Huawei has easier access to financing than its rivals through the Chinese government, its part owner.

Cisco seems to be taking direct aim at Microsoft with one of the biggest new products it introduced Monday, the Cisco WebEx Mail hosted e-mail service. WebEx Mail will let enterprise employees use their e-mail through a Web-based interface or their Microsoft Outlook clients. The service, based on technology acquired with PostPath, follows on from Cisco's gradual move into hosted services through its WebEx virtual meeting system.

It represents an alternative to Exchange servers owned and operated by enterprises themselves, Gartner's Dulaney said. WebEx Mail is also aimed at Google's enterprise Gmail and hosted e-mail that Microsoft is expected to offer. However, for most enterprises, e-mail works and doesn't need fixing, Dulaney said. "For most of our clients, change is something they fear," he said.