Cisco Brings Consumer Tech To Enterprise Collaboration

Irwin Lazar, an analyst with Nemertes Research and the moderator of the panel discussion on the TelePresence conference, said businesses are showing an increasing interest in transferring the communications capabilities inherent in social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace into the business environment. However, the issues of security and management have to be addressed, Lazar said. “We’re seeing a lot of companies being a lot more serious about putting together collaboration [environments] that go beyond the silos of audio and video,” Lazar said.

Perfect example of that

Cisco officials said Quad is a perfect example of that. The enterprise collaboration platform will combine asynchronous communications technologies—e-mail, microblogging, updates—and marry them with more real-time tools like live video conferencing.

Cisco also is bringing enterprise-level management and security into the mix, including integration with Cisco’s Enterprise Policy Manager offering. Security features include rules-based policies, encryption for communications and the ability to manage restricted and private communities.

The Prosumer Video solution will be available in August. “We’re leveraging these [consumer] technologies and creating new products to solve enterprise problems,” Paul Fulton, general manager of Cisco’s Prosumer Business Unit, said during the TelePresence conference.

The Prosumer Business Unit

The Prosumer Business Unit was built to address the intersection of consumer and enterprise technology, and the Flip video camera is a perfect example, Fulton said. “We found that consumers bought these cameras and brought them into the workplace,” he said.

Cisco also unveiled WebEx Connect 6.5, its enterprise IM product, which now lets users access their contact lists and send messages through a browser-based IM client. It also is localised for French, German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, and businesses can use server-side capabilities to capture logs of IM traffic for compliance requirements.

In addition, Cisco is drawing on its acquisition of Jabber in 2008 to enable businesses to add presence and chat capabilities to their applications through its AJAX XMPP library, which will help developers more easily create XMPP-enabled Web applications by supplying such tools as source code, code samples and documentation.