Networking giant Cisco on Wednesday unveiled a wide-ranging manifesto on its new strategic goals, putting it on a collision course with Microsoft and IBM.
The San Jose-based networking pioneer's move comes after the company pulled the trigger on sixteen acquisitions in two years. The company hopes to embed enough application functionality into the network to challenge the status quo.
Cisco announced network-resident features that allow employees to collaborate easily and securely across diverse devices and operating systems–a process called unified communications.
The company also unveiled a set of telepresence technology that gives corporate users the feeling that they are present at a meeting in another city.
Cisco also highlighted its software-as-a-service technology that allows enterprises to purchase and access their computing needs via the Internet.
The networking company assesses the value of all three collaborative technology markets at $34 billion and believes it can make collaboration simpler for enterprises by pushing these applications into the network.
“Cisco is saying that they can program all these functions into the network rather than rely on servers and storage,” said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT Research. “It certainly places Cisco on a different side of computing to all of the other vendors.”
Microsoft has also focused a lot of its energies on unified communications but it has done so as a central player among a network of communications partners including Cisco rival Nortel.
IBM has hardware and middleware that address all three Cisco technologies – unified communications, telepresence, and SaaS, but has also attacked it from traditional servers and always with partners.
Cisco made sixteen acquisitions in the past two years, includingWebEx, focusing on software vendors with either user-facing applications or hosted software services–most of which will be part of its network-residentsoftware push.
“Cisco is like a kid who is building a hot rod in the garage, very quietly putting in the fuel injectors etc. and then one day he rolls the car out of the garage and blows down the street,” Mr. King said.
But Cisco says it is not leaving out other vendors. Its products are open and designed to accept third-party applications and hardware, along with enterprise business applications.
“Interoperating is in our DNA and our collaboration platform is designed to interoperate with the applications and network infrastructure companies already have,” said Colin Smith, a Cisco spokesman.