The following is Part 1 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco . What is driving Cisco into the collaboration market? There are many reasons driving Cisco in this direction (revenue opportunities, growth needs, and customer demand). Cisco believes that the collaboration market is in transition – that there are structural changes This should come as no surprise to market followers or competitors – Cisco is a company that strongly believes that its ability to grow and innovate is dependent on how well it: · Understands the emergence and evolution

Over the past several weeks, two Cisco events generated a great deal of media coverage (refer to “In The News” below). For those that have not been paying close attention, for some time now Cisco has actively been playing a grand chess game. While the media stories below fail to provide detailed product guidance as to where Cisco is going, the information does provide interesting insight as to how Cisco’s leadership team thinks about collaboration, cloud computing, The company has already made several moves in terms of acquisitions (WebEx, PostPath, Jabber) and strategy (describing a general direction regarding collaboration and SaaS/Cloud computing via WebEx Connect).

I thought I would offer some comments on some UC predictions offered by Gurdeep Singh Pall, who heads Microsoft's UC group: No Jitter | Microsoft: Gurdeep's UC Predictions single identity with presence at the core is spot on - but it makes you wonder why Microsoft does not openly share its rich presence information? 1. UC gets unified The term "unified communications" has long been muddled and miss-used, and the problem is made worse by vendors who slap a "unified" label on products that are anything but.

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Highlights of Cisco's press release is below (with a link to the full release). Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory is a Cisco-hosted directory of endpoints, organizations and people with access to Cisco TelePresence endpoints. The directory features a virtual assistant to assist with scheduling meetings between  the more than 1000 rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges. Additional blog posts will come out later today (starting around noon PT) that will include my early thoughts. I

The following is Part 2 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco . What is Cisco announcing? To understand and decipher what Cisco is announcing, it is important to break the information down into four distinct areas: Strategic Pillars, Reference Architecture, “Extend Current”, and “Enter New”. Interoperable, Open Architecture: Given the strategic focus on Strategic Pillars SOA, Rest) to enable any device or application to leverage a consistent set of core of collaborative services.

The following is Part 4 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco . Is Cisco’s Vision Holistic Enough? While Cisco does a very good job of navigating market transitions and managing its efforts to move into market adjacencies, that does not mean that it has “perfect knowledge”. Cisco may think it knows the borders of a market in which the borders are in The collaboration market is not well defined. Some strategists include content management, search, portal, and Enterprise 2.0

The following is Part 3 of a series on today's announcement by Cisco . Cisco needs to compare/contrast its approach with Microsoft’s BPOS – not just e-mail but overall to equate synergies from other WebEx Collaboration Cloud services. Does Cisco believe that it is now competing in the portal market with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle? Clarifications & Questions As the launch event and collaboration summit progress, additional information will be provided.

Right now, enterprise instant messaging is dominated by IBM and Microsoft. IBM and Microsoft). Presence is also dominated by IBM and Microsoft. That position will still go to IBM and Microsoft. Although Cisco has a broader collaboration arsenal than Avaya given its I've posted a lot recently regarding enterprise social messaging ("Twitter for the enterprise"): Twitter in the Workplace

Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) is a disappointing platform for social computing in my opinion. My position for some time has been that the next release will be a tipping point for Microsoft's social computing efforts. Either Microsoft "gets it right" and delivers a forward-looking release with significant improvements that transforms SharePoint into a market-leading social computing platform, or it delivers a release that has only incremental improvements to existing Rather than list off a "top ten" list of predictions for 2009, I thought I would briefly layout some topics and areas that business and IT decision-makers should pay attention to when formulating Enterprise 2.0