Cisco Aids in Business to Business Collaboration with New Social Software

According to this article in CNN Money Cisco has recently introduced several product improvements to its already existing line of collaboration portfolio. It also announced its launch of two new markets - enterprise social software and hosted email. It's goal is to bring the collaborative power of communities to businesses.

Cisco TelePresence and Unified Communications allow for collaboration by delivering video, voice, and presence capabilities throughout the organization. It will be interesting to see the companies that will quickly follow suit.

iPod Touch Gaining Enterprise Credibility

When the iPhone first came out, there was a sudden rush of executives that were trying to justify the use of this phone in the enterprise. Now, according to this post on the Burton Group Blog the iPod Touch might be an even bigger story than the iPhone. The iPod Touch already supports the Safari web browser and enterprise capabilities like support for virtual private networks (L2TP/IPSEC, Cisco IPSec, and PPTP). These latest numbers from the AdMob report show how traffic from the iPod Touch is just exploding!

• Traffic from iPod Touch in the US and UK was “2.7 and 3.2 times higher” the week after Christmas than the week before.
• “The iPod Touch is now the #2 device in the AdMob network with a 4.7% share.” The #1 device is the iPhone with a 10.8% share.

These numbers show us that the Touch might someday surpass the iPhone itself. For enterprise purposes, I want to see how well the Touch will compete with Blackberry’s release of its touch screen model, the Storm.

Cisco invests in Xobni

According to the New York Times, Xobni has received a $7 million of funding from Cisco. This is Cisco's latest venture in to Web 2.0 tools, following Jabber, Postpath, and WebEx.

Collaboration is a key focus of this investment, both between companies and the software that Cisco has been investing in.

“Cisco and Xobni actually share a very similar vision of using collaboration,” said Sandhya Venkatachalam, director of corporate development at Cisco. They both “center the experience around the people one wants to communicate with.”

Read more here.

Smart phone is now main focus at Nokia

Nokia recently decided to drop its work with enterprise email and work with partners such as Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM to focus on collaboration between smart phones and enterprise platforms. The plan was mapped out at EWeek.

Niklas Savander, Nokia's executive vice president for services and software, had this to say abou the new focus:

"Together with them, we will use our expertise in devices, as well as the combined channel footprint and customer base, to deliver a range of unbeatable end-to-end offerings for business."

Cisco Focuses on Business Users Collaborating

Cisco, as announced in this WSJ article, that they will be releasing several new tools and products with the aim to help business users collaborate more effectively. The company has predicted that this market is worth $34 billion, and as such with this announcement, hopes to reel in a chunk of it. The start of their entry into this market space began with their acquisition of WebEx, and along with the new releases and updates to existing products, Cisco will be facing existing industry heavyweights including Microsoft and Google. Regarding this entry into a new market, the WSJ article reports:

“The offerings include Cisco WebEx Connect, an online service designed to integrate tools such as instant messaging and Web conferencing with conventional business software and newer Internet applications such as blogs and wikis, which are collaborative Web sites.”

Instant Messaging in the Enterprise: Is it Finally Here?

There has been some recent hype this past week about the Cisco’s latest purchase of Jabber, a tech startup that enables real-time text and VoIP communication over the internet.

This post on Telecommunications Industry News discusses how Cisco will be able to embed certain messaging features into its collaboration products such as the WebEx Conference system and Cisco Unified Communications. Instant messaging has long been banned by many corporate offices across the US, but could this new acquisition be the changing factor in the adoption of IM in the enterprise?

Enterprise Email is Interesting Again

Early this morning I came across this post from the Collaboration and Content Strategies Blog in which Bill Pray lists 5 reasons why the email market and enterprise messaging is getting interesting again. Here’s a summary of the reasons:

1. Choice – Microsoft and IBM had long dominated this market, but Google, Zimbra, Yahoo!, Cisco, Oracle, and Novell are all playing catch-up to these industry giants. Greater choice will foster more innovation and lower prices.
2. SaaS – Google, Yahoo!, and Cisco are all software as a service offerings for email, and that keeps them interesting. Microsoft and IBM should soon be unveiling something similar to compete with these three companies.
3. Social Software – Social media and software is making email more interesting by providing new ways to collaborate within bigger platforms and networks.
4. Mashups – There are several solutions out there that serves as email aggregators: Zenbe, Orgoo, and Fuser are just a small list of solutions that offer this feature.
5. Legal Decisions – Courts are still deciding and defining the legal status of email used within the enterprise between users. Courts will continue to add complexity to email usage.