Cisco - Q2 Collaboration Review

Today was the first time I've attended one of Cisco's Collaboration Reviews via telepresence. Telephone or WebEx sessions are the norm, and while they're usually pretty good, TP is the next best thing to being there. Before getting your hopes up too high, this wasn't a full-blown TP session (and I've been on plenty of those). It was just me and their AR liaision, Andrea Berry at Cisco Canada's HQ in downtown Toronto. While this was a global event, with 22 analysts participating, it looks like I was the lone Canadian analyst - lucky me. So, I can say with pretty good confidence that this may well be the first news you've heard about today.

There wasn't anything really groundbreaking, and the session was just an hour - and I mean that literally. Cisco makes extensive use of TP internally, and apparently their TP rooms are booked months in advance. So, when your time slot is up, it's up. The screen abruptly went blank on the host in mid-sentence at 1pm on the dot. Gotta keep the train moving I guess.

Most of the talking was done by two key drivers of their collaboration initiatives - Barry O'Sullivan - SVP Voice Technology Group, and Carl Wiese - SVP Global Collaboration Sales. They had a lot to recap from the recent quarter, and here are the main points that I can share:

- they posted 17% year-over-year growth across their collaboration portfolio - UC, contact center, telepresence, IP telephony, WebEx, etc.

- like any vendor in this space, they have been aggressively going after competitors who have struggled, namely Nortel, Siemens and ALU

- while revenues were not disclosed, they cited early successes in their various spaces - 12 customers now using WebEx Mail (all are U.S. and primarily SMB), 450+ are using cloud-based IM, over 3,600 locations using telepresence, and 75 customers using Show and Share

- perhaps the strongest message overall was their move into hosted services - this will now give their customers a choice between premise-based and carrier-based solutions

- highlights were given about 4 recent customer wins - each one showcasing a particular strength of Cisco or attractive market opportunity

- their objective of providing "pervasive video" - both big and small - was briefly discussed, but no updates on the Tandberg deal were given

A couple of these points warrant a bit more detail, so here goes...

Regarding WebEx Mail, that was a highlight for me at their Collaboration Summit last November. They shared one lesson learned with us today, which I found interesting. Their early deployments did not support BlackBerry, and it looks like they underestimated how important this was, even for SMBs. As such, they've had to accelerate BlackBerry integration to keep these deployments moving forward. I asked if they had any indication yet as to whether their email platform has led to faster adoption of other collaboration tools. They liked the question, but didn't have much to say - am guessing it's early days, but I have to think that's the end game here.

The move to hosted has huge implications, and the analysts had lots of questions about this one. I wanted to better understand the role they seek to play, especially in terms of owning the customer and sharing revenues with service providers. They talked about their intent being to get the carrier set up to offer hosted, and then let them run with it. The acronym they used is BOT - "Build, Operate and Transfer". That's the process, and we'll just have to see how it actually unfolds. It's clear they want to have it both ways - deploy on-prem, as well as partner with carriers - with the customer choosing the best path. They wouldn't quantify the market opportunity, but did go so far to say that it "appears real". They're in talks with 10 carriers now, and BT is the one they point to as an announced partner for hosted. There is a lot of potential here for channel conflict, and Cisco is not afraid to tread on new ground. However, I got the sense they are approaching hosted cautiously, and it looked to me like they were choosing their words carefully. Regardless, they're not going to ignore the hosted market, so get used to it, folks.

Two customer wins were of particular interest to me. One was Duke University, where they talked about how they're using telepresence to help extend the classroom experience off campus. I've long felt that distance learning is a huge opportunity, and that IP technologies will play a big role in re-defining higher education.

The other customer win was Molina Healthcare. Aside from this being another great vertical market for collaboration, they cited an interesting outcome from deploying telepresence there. They're finding that people are meeting twice as often, but for half as long. That's a pretty good result, and a great way to validate the value of telepresence.

Finally, I just had to comment on the actual experience of using TP today. Since the topic was collaboration, one would expect the tools for the meeting would properly reflect that. For the most part they did. Even though the screen we used was fairly small - see photos below - both the audio and video quality were very good. However, there was no use of split screens, which would have been effective at times, since Barry and Carl were in different locations. As such, the visuals were very much in a serial manner. One speaker at a time - cut to the next speaker - cut back to the first speaker, etc. I found it a bit like watching a newscast - it's ok, but not that engaging.

Two other small things. I suspect other locations had multiple screens, whereas we only had one. When the host was addressing me, she was looking to the right, which must have been the screen she was seeing me on. This would look perfectly normal from her end, but Andrea and I only saw her looking right, and not at us. This takes some getting used to, as it wasn't clear that she was talking to me. To us, it looked like she was talking to someone else. Live and learn.

The other small thing was the use of a slide deck during the session. They were really just used in passing reference, and most of our attention was centered on the speakers. That was probably for the best, since the slides were only displayed in the bottom right corner of the screen. Since we had a small TP unit, the slides were really small, and almost impossible to read. I'm sure this would be less of a problem on a full-size system, so I guess this comes with the territory. On the other hand, I would have been just as happy to have no slides, which would give us an unobstructed view of the speaker (see photos below). For any speaker sitting on that side of the screen, the slides block out a good portion of their body. While Anderson Cooper would probably roll with that, Ted Baxter would be freaking out - so, as long as the egos are in check, it's probably not a problem. :-)


Barry O'Sullivan


Carl Wiese

Cisco Collaboration Summit - Day 1

Yesterday was the kickoff for Cisco's Collaboration Summit. Last year I attended virtually, and this was my first time going in person. As with other Cisco events, it's very well staged, and has the feel of a rock concert at times. Given that the focus is on collaboration and using all the multimedia tools to fullest effect, it all felt about right.

There was a lot of buildup around the slew of releases coming from Cisco now, and they made this clear repeatedly, so the basic message is that Cisco is up to some big things and jumping to new curves. That's not a new message from Cisco these days, and they shared a lot of vision with us about how they're taking collaboration and the cloud to new levels, and how this is going to change the way we work.

A lot of the discussion was around plumbing and architectures, and not being an IT guy, the technical revelations were not as interesting to me as the focus on what collaboration and the cloud means to the enterprise and the end user experience.

Things opened with an appropos reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened 20 years ago yesterday. Of course, Cisco is trying to do the same thing with their vision for collaboration. They view this as a $30 billion opportunity, and in short, their definition of collaboration is people + teams + information. Fair enough, but it's going to take the better part of 3 days to explain all this to us.

Even though yesterday's session was only 2 hours long, I wasn't alone in trying to get my head around the multitude of announcements and initiatives Cisco shared with us. Lots of talk, esp from John Chambers, about the need to have strength in two areas - the underlying technologies, as well as being supported by business processes that are driven by specific goals for the enterprise.

They spent a lot of times demonstrating this by Cisco's own example in terms of how they've done a lot of this themselves. John Chambers talked about the cultural changes Cisco has gone through, shifting from "command and control" to "teamwork and innovation". He backed this up talking about Cisco making 4 acquisitions in the past 45 days, which could only been possible by having all these collaboration capabilities in place. Am not sure if enterprise customers have taken these ideas totally to heart, but Cisco sure seems to have made the move, and it's hard to deny that they have a lot of agility for a company of its size and global reach.

Otherwise, lots of impressive demos and messaging about how "the new normal" is driven by collaboration, especially video. Most of the focus is about Webex and Telepresence, with a few references to IP phones (esp the new 9971 video-enabled phone). Remember routers? Not a word here. This is all about defining the new normal - helping IT cope with the endless treadmill that IP is putting us on - more info than ever before, more devices, more access, more security risks, more storage needs, more power/energy demands, fast time to market, etc. More, more, more.

If you can figure all this out, then Cisco has the answers. I can't sum this up with a simple explanation - that's why we're here for 3 days. So, conceptually, we all get it, and in Cisco's mind, the path is clear. With each passing session, it's getting clearer to the rest of us, so just bear with me another day or two.

Waiting to begin - setting the stage...





See that glow above his head? That's the JC halo - it follows him everywhere - he's so good getting his message across...



Nice demo here, with a video image on the right for Telepresence, and the same image on the left on Cisco's new IP phone.

Next Stop - San Fran - Cisco Collaboration Summit

It's been a busy few weeks travel-wise, and my last stop is finally coming up. Next week, I'll be in San Francisco, attending Cisco's 2009 Collaboration Summit.

Not much more to say, but I feel lucky to be part of this group, and collaboration is definitely of interest to me these days. Cisco has been active in this space all year, even if you put the Tandberg story aside. Am sure that will be one of the topics of discussion, but I'm particularly interested in how they'll be going to market with scaled down collaboration solutions that will have broader market appeal. As I saw on my Telepresence panel at Supercomm last month, Cisco is doing just fine there, but not everyone needs or wants full scale TP.

Anyhow, I rarely get to San Francisco, so this will be nice stop. I'm there Monday through Wednesday, and if things go to plan, I'll be done traveling for 2009. Time will tell.

Cisco's New Vision for Telepresence and Collaboration

Last Friday I had an engaging briefing with Cisco about their latest vision for collaboration, Unified Communications and Telepresence - perhaps the largest words in Cisco's lexicon these days. I mean that in the strategic sense of course, as these have been major growth themes for them since last year. Their news was under embargo until today, but I've been quite busy both in and out of the office today, and this is my first chance to post.

We all know about Cisco's Telepresence ambitions at the high end of the market, and they've done a great job there. It's getting a lot harder to find takers in this economy, and it's been just a matter of time until Cisco scaled down the product for the rest of us. They've been going in this direction for a while, but the latest iteration puts it that much more within reach of the mainstream business market.

There are a lot of moving parts to this story, so much so that there were two news releases about it - here and here. All told, this forms the Cisco Collaboration Portfolio, and pulls together a multitude of technologies and solutions that serve to make us more productive in the workplace.

Apologies if I'm sounding a bit vague here, but I'm struggling to share the essence of this in words. We covered an awful lot of ground in our briefing, and touched on just about every form of communication and collaboration, with all of it in some way falling under this portfolio umbrella. I know there's a lot of good value here, and during the briefing we talked about the challenges of pulling this together and articulating a clear value proposition.

On one level, this portfolio concept is Cisco's way of building on network-centric solutions and becoming more applications-centric. Looking at the bigger pieces - Telepresence, WebEx, mobility, iPhone support, integration with Microsoft Office - it's mostly about apps and endpoints - not a lot here about routers and switches or their more recent move into blade servers. Fair enough - we know this is where the growth is, and Cisco has rightly bet heavily that video is a key driver.

All told, there is a lot to like about what Cisco is doing here, and I wish I could convey it in short, simple terms. On a marketing level that could be a challenge unto itself, as the story I'm hearing is mostly about productivity and efficiency rather than cost savings. I don't want to sound too pedestrian, but saving money seems to be the big - and sometimes only - thing people I'm in contact with want to talk about right now.

Cisco does not chase these cost-driven businesses as a matter of course, but it's harder to be picky these days. That said, there is certainly an important segment of the market that will buy into their portfolio concept - and one of the press releases is largely built around an independent study validating this.

My main takeaway from all this is that if collaboration and improving business processes is high on your strategy agenda, then Cisco's Collaboration Portfolio will resonate very well. It was great to see a scaled down Telepresence system - the 1300 - and I really loved the Recording Studio concept.

The very first time I saw Telepresence, I asked whether sessions could be recorded. At the time, the answer was no, but clearly it's yes today. During the briefing we touched on some great examples of how Telepresence is being used to record video segments for things like training, job interviews, making announcements and recording presentations for future use. To me, that's what makes this technology cool - enabling new ways of working that could not be done before. Not to mention in Hi Def.

To balance out this post, my main caveat is that if it's this complex to explain, then it's too complex for the market. Maybe not all the market, but a big piece, I'd say. I know Cisco has a good idea here and the right idea, but it takes a bit of effort to understand all the pieces and how they fit together. That's fine - it's an emerging space, and nobody has figured it out, so it's hard to expect the precision of Procter & Gamble here. That time will come, I'm sure, but we're not there yet.

On another level, of course, this is tricky territory in that Cisco is extending its market presence into areas that have usually been the domain of their partners, and invariably conflicts will arise - not just with these partners, but the channels and enterprises themselves. I don't have an easy answer to all of this other than saying business is business, and if Cisco has what the market wants, they must be doing something right.

Nortel - the Good News: Web.Alive

Ok, ok - it's pretty hard to ignore the bombshell news that's on front pages everywhere today in Canada. It looks like Nortel is going to seek bankruptcy protection, perhaps as early as today. This may be a minor story in the U.S. business press, but it's a big story in tech/telecom, and a HUGE story here in Canada.

You don't need me to tell you what Nortel means to Canada in terms of pride and joy, although that's more of a distant memory these days. Today's news isn't totally unexpected, and Nortel is hardly alone in facing hard times. Still, it hurts, and sadly takes Canada down a notch or two in the scheme of things. Of course we have tons of successful and promising tech companies here, but if you mashed them all together, they would still be far behind all the things Nortel has accomplished over the years.

Seems that every time I have an interesting post to write, I get trumped by something like this. I had a great demo call with Nortel yesterday, and I'm probably the only one out there writing something positive about the company today. As big as this morning's news is, I don't care. My story is better, and I'm gonna give you some good news about Nortel! :-)

So, what's Web.Alive? Last week I posted about Web.Alive and Nortel's announcement at CES with Lenovo. If this is new to you, then you should start with that post. Web.Alive is Nortel's virtual collaboration platform, and was developed with help from DiamondWare, a company I know quite well that Nortel acquired last year.

Lenovo is their first commercial customer, and yesterday I got a personalized demo in the Lenovo eLounge, led by the key Web.Alive leaders, namely Arn Hyndman and Nic Sauriol. This is a very cool experience, and if you're a gamer you'll find this a lot of fun. I'm not a gamer, and it took a little getting used to, but it's a pretty intuitive experience. Everyone has an avatar - which can be personalized, of course - and once you're in the eLounge, it's like being in Second Life. You can wander around, talk to people, ask questions, and most importantly, check out all the Lenovo laptop computers there for sale.

As you read this, you're getting a mental picture, which is fine, but once you experience this and interact with others in the lounge, you'll get a much better understanding about what makes this a great application. For example, when I start looking at the features of a particular laptop, the bottom of the screen dynamically links to a spec sheet in real time off the Lenovo website. So, while I'm getting a close up 360 look at the laptop, I can also review the speeds and feeds as well as the special price if I buy it during my eLounge visit.

At one level, this will really appeal to people who love the virtual reality experience, and those who are into shopping at 3 am - wherever they are on the planet. That's pretty neat - and a great way for a manufacturer to extend their retail presence without building standalone stores. It's also an option for people who aren't comfortable dealing with sales people in person, or people who want to project a different persona when out there shopping.

On a one-to-one level, Web.Alive makes a lot of sense. But it gets even more interesting when you think about the collaborative possibilities. During the demo, I was taken to siderooms where you can have private meetings, or presentation rooms, where in depth demos were done for a seated audience. People are free to drop in and out of conversations - just like you would in a real store. The more people there are in the eLounge, the greater the chances are you'll talk with others who may share your interests, or who can help answer your questions. I could go on, but you really need to see it for yourself. You can check out the Lenovo eLounge for yourself here, although I don't know how much you can really experience without a guided tour.

Beyond selling laptops, I should add that Web.Alive has all kinds of other applications. First and foremost, sure, it's a great 3.0 platform to help companies grow their sales online. It's also a natural forum for training, distance education and meetings. At Nortel's analyst day back in May, they showed us how Web.Alive can be an effective substitute for video conferencing, and even telepresence. Taking this a step further, they envision Web.Alive replacing the PBX altogher, and becoming the native platform for all forms of everyday communication.

That last point to me is the BIG IDEA, and the next curve for companies to jump to when thinking about communications. There's a lot of exciting innovation happening here, and while it's still ahead of what the market is ready for, I think it shows vision for where things are going and what Communications 3.0 is going to mean.

To me, that sure looks like the mojo Nortel had when they were BNR, and Cisco wasn't on the map. Perhaps this is too little too late, but Web.Alive may well be the most valuable asset Nortel has that can be a game changer for someone who gets it. Am sure the Nortel watchers have much higher priorities today, but if you want to look beyond the smoke to see what will have value tomorrow, this is where I'd be going.