Ian Gallagher, Cisco Canada
Underscoring the growing ubiquity of cloud, Cisco chose to focus this year’s Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles on recent enhancements to the collaboration solution portfolio – as they will be delivered via public, private or hybrid cloud computing. In the weight afforded to partners in these announcements, Cisco also offered a glimpse into its view of the most likely mechanism for the delivery of solution innovation: while technology improvements that could serve the enterprise customer were included, a broad set of collaboration updates aimed at helping the service provider community expand sources of cloud revenue took centre stage. Partner-centric in nature, at the Summit, Cisco reinforced its strategy of delivering cloud services through service provider relationships, with multiple TelePresence, contact centre, UC and mobility solution announcements in the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) space. Cisco’s goal in extending existing offerings to the cloud is to help service providers, SIs, wholesalers and resellers develop their ability to provide a robust unified collaboration experience “as-a-service.”
According to Ian Gallagher, director of collaboration engineering for Cisco Canada, Cisco has been “building on its vision in the collaboration space for the better part of five years,” and the Summit was designed more to showcase successful execution on this vision, rather than to launch a barrage of product announcements. That said, a number of updates sscheduled for release in Q4 2012 were announced, which reflect continued R&D investment in the collaboration portfolio, and more importantly, demonstrate Cisco’s determination to introduce improvements “on customer and partner terms that are deployable on-prem, in the cloud or on any of the greyscale hybrid combinations in between.”
