Today, Cisco is having its annual collaboration summit and, in conjunction with that, announced 61 new products to support the summit and new vision.  Obviously with 61 new products there were some that were more interesting than others, but much of the value that Cisco is bringing is enabling business to business communications, a weak spot in most corporate collaboration solutions.

One of the new products, called Intercompany Media Engine, allows organizations to communicate with other organizations over any IP network expanding the value of the tools.  The “network effect” is derived from Metcalf’s Law which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes on it.  The more nodes there are, the higher the value.  This has certainly been the driving force behind the growth in popularity of many of the consumer collaboration tools such as chat, Facebook and Twitter.  However, our corporate collaboration tools are generally limited to the reach of our own company which limits the value.  I know there are ways to make the tools work but that just underscores the problem, B2B communications shouldn’t be something that we have to “make work.”  As long as that’s true, corporate UC will never enjoy the hockey stick growth the industry has been waiting for.

As part of this release Cisco is extending the B2B capabilities to Telepresence.  Finally we can Telepresence with people in other organizations.  I was chatting with a business leader just last week that has a Telepresence system and he confessed to me that while the system is great for executive meetings, it just doesn’t get that much use because most people have no idea how to Telepresence with others.  This is a huge hurdle for Telepresence to overcome and is a great step in increasing the value of corporate video.  Ultimately what you would like is for people to just try and communicate with one another, if video communications is possible, then invoke it without having to worry about what kind of system it is, if they interoperate, etc.  Obviously the intercompany Telepresence doesn’t get us there but it’s a small step towards that.

This is the first announcement out of Cisco where they truly leverage the investment they made in WebEx.  Software as a service (SaaS) has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past several years and Yankee Group research predicts that by 2012, more software will be bought as SaaS than as traditional premise based software; WebEx gives Cisco a leg up in that regard.  Of particular interest is Cisco’s cloud based instant messenger and WebEx Mail that leverages the acquisitions of Jabber and PostPath respectively.   It may seem strange that Cisco would choose to move into two markets, IM and e-mail that are heavily dominated by Microsoft and, to a lesser extent, IBM but I do think the shift to SaaS creates an opportunity for Cisco.

The shift to SaaS based e-mail will create a change in buying habits, just like the shift to SaaS based software has in other markets and Cisco’s hoping to grab a chunk of that market.  This won’t be a quick transition or something that gives Cisco 25 percent share overnight but with all the regulatory mandates around e-mail retention and the overall increase in the size of e-mail, it gets much harder for organizations to manage their own e-mail server, so it makes sense to push it into the cloud and be done with it.  One of Cisco’s advantages in this over the other web based services is that it allows the users to continue to use Outlook for the client.  This means IT can change out the back end but have the workers go on and use the client that they are familiar with.

The announcements today also bring Cisco into the social media markets, one of the key building blocks of an Anywhere Enterprise and a missing component of corporate UC solutions.  Cisco’s “Show and Share” is a social video solution which allows workers to upload videos, tag them, rank them, search, etc making it easy for workers to share videos with one another.  Social media was one of the hot topics at the recent VoiceCon event and I expect to see Cisco continue to grow this area as a point of differentiation.

There were a number of other announcements Cisco made included some new phones and end points but the above ones were the ones that I saw as the key announcements.  Later this year Microsoft will announced its next wave of OCS making it a full PBX replacement so now we’ll be able to buy phones from Microsoft and e-mail from Cisco.  Who would have thought it?