 |
Cisco seemingly reverted to its dotcom boom ways of expansion through acquisition today when it plunked down $3.2B for WebEx, the leader in Web conferencing. Scott Fulton at BetaNews reviews the state of play:
Throughout its history, Cisco has built its vast portfolio talents through mergers and acquisitions. Indeed, startups in the networking field intentionally developed business plans and product portfolios designed to attract a Cisco buyout. But with two new Cisco buyouts this week — storage appliance producer NeoPath Networks on Tuesday, and collaboration software developer WebEx this morning — Cisco appears not just to be building up but building out. And today, analysts believe Microsoft may be on notice.
It’s all part of Cisco’s Unified Communications push which has gotten a lot of notice lately and not coincidentally Unified Communications is the name of the Microsoft Business Division group charged with cornering the business communications market and whose Office Live Meeting Product (created from the 2003 acquisition of PlaceWare) is reported to be number 2 in the Web conferencing market and looks to be clearly in the path of the steamroller
Rik Turner sets the stage for the upcoming showdown in unified business communications at Computer Business Review Online in IBM and Cisco team against Microsoft and Nortel:
IBM and Cisco have announced an alliance bringing together Big Blue’s Sametime collaboration platform with Cisco’s Unified Communications portfolio, in an obvious face-off against Microsoft and Nortel’s Innovative Communications Alliance.
The two industry heavyweights unveiled the initiative a the VoiceCon Spring event in Orlando, Florida, describing plans to deliver something they call the Unified Comms and Collaboration (UC2) Client Platform, which they call “an open set of application programming interfaces offered by IBM as a subset of Lotus Sametime… along with communication APIs by Cisco to access comms functionality such as voice and video services.”
The partners intend to drive app development for their joint offerings by fostering the use of the Eclipse Java development environment and the Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi) framework, both of which IBM has been heavily involved in over the years.
…
Beyond that, however, they’ll be doing their own app dev work, delivering “specific customer offerings including a joint solution based on the new client platform and a set of plug-ins that bring together the communications and collaboration capabilities of both companies.”The UC2 Client Platform will now form the basis of both companies’ comms and collaboration clients, IBM saying Sametime 7.5 is already based on it, while Cisco committed to porting its newly launched Unified Personal Communicator client in future versions. Among other companies expressing support for the new platform from the get-go were Nokia and RIM, both of whose handset will presumably be able to house the client, as well as Citrix and Presidio, which is a Cisco partner for its high-end TelePresence conferencing portfolio.
…
In addition to the UC2 client serving as the basis for joint offerings, IBM and Cisco also promised “communication and collaboration products from both companies” as well as “expanded go-to-market activities including Cisco selling Lotus Sametime and IBM selling Cisco Unified Communications Manager [i.e. the Cisco IP PBX], Cisco Unity [the voicemail platform] and Cisco Unified MeetingPlace [its conferencing platform].” There is also a services dimension with IBM Global Technology Services offering assessment through to implementation on the combined portfolio.
There are many more details on the partners’ planned offerings by following the link, but here’s the nut:
And so the battle lines are drawn in unified communications, with Microsoft and its operating system and Real-Time Collaboration Suite, going in alongside Nortel’s CS1000 IP PBX and its MCS5100 app server for conferencing, and IBM hooking up with Cisco for an equivalent offering, with a greater open source component from Big Blue and Cisco increasingly embracing Linux.
It is, in essence, the Notes vs. Exchange battle writ large, and with Microsoft and Cisco moving increasingly into competition in a variety of other areas such as network access control, it is only natural that the networking heavyweight should seek an alliance with IBM to present as broad a front as ICA promises.
Finally, on a related note, Microsoft announced a March beta for Office Communications Server 2007:
In a keynote address at VoiceCon Spring 2007, Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft Corp.’s Business Division, today predicted that in just three years, the average voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) solution for business will cost half what it does today, as VoIP systems move from hardware to software. Raikes also predicted that in the same time frame, 100 million people — twice the number of current business VoIP users — will have the ability to make phone calls from Microsoft® Office applications.
…
Outlining Microsoft’s progress toward delivering its enterprise voice solutions, Raikes also announced that Microsoft will distribute the public beta-test version of Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft’s VoIP and unified communications server, and Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft’s unified communications client, to millions of testers later this month.
There had been a private beta back in December.
Microsoft Corp. today opened a private beta of its new enterprise voice communications server, Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007, to 2,500 IT professionals. Office Communications Server 2007 allows companies to integrate voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) technology into existing telephony infrastructure, eliminating the need for expensive network overhauls and also extending the useful life of existing investments. The new voice server will also allow workers to instantly launch a phone call from 2007 Microsoft Office applications, such as Office Word 2007, Office Outlook® 2007 or Office Communicator, by simply clicking on a colleague’s name to determine his or her availability and initiate a person-to-person or multiparty call.
With native support for Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communicator, part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system, interoperate with products from industry partners including Nortel Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., LG-Nortel Co. Ltd., Mitel Networks Corp., NEC Philips Unified Solutions, Polycom Inc. and Siemens Communications Inc. Through these relationships, customers worldwide will be able to support VoIP using their existing desktop phones, data networks and time division multiplexing (TDM) or Internet protocol (IP) private branch exchanges (PBXs). Customers will also able to leverage the softphone capabilities of Office Communicator to make and receive phone calls from their PCs, eliminating the need to purchase expensive IP-compatible phones.
Microsoft is being coy about an availability date, but Office Communications Server (which had a shotgun wedding with Exchange in January) is key to Microsoft’s Unified Communications push. There’s also a Q&A on the whole lashup here.
Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are delivering on their previously stated commitment to provide customers and partners with clear guidance on how Cisco Network Admission Control (NAC) and Microsoft® Network Access Protection (NAP) will interoperate. The two companies are demonstrating the new interoperable architecture at The Security Standard conference (http://www.thesecuritystandard.net), which opened today in Boston.
A technical white paper released today by the two companies describes how Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP interoperate for security policy enforcement and health assessment. The white paper describes the architecture and provides details on how to integrate the embedded security capabilities of Cisco’s network infrastructure with those of Microsoft Windows Vista™ and the future version of Windows Server®, code-named “Longhorn.” The white paper can be downloaded at http://www.cisco.com/go/nac and http://www.microsoft.com/nap.
In addition, the two companies have revealed a general road map for bringing Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP interoperability to market, including a limited beta program set to start later this calendar year. Customers will be able to start deploying the Cisco NAC-Microsoft NAP interoperable solution once Windows Server “Longhorn” is available in the second half of 2007. Cisco and Microsoft have cross-licensed the Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP protocols to help ensure interoperability and to enable both companies to respond to future market and customer requirements.
…
Although both companies will continue delivering their individual solutions, customers now have a choice between Cisco NAC, Microsoft NAP, or the interoperable solution from both companies. The joint architecture allows communication and policy enforcement across Cisco NAC and Microsoft NAP, enabling an end-to-end solution to be built around the Cisco and Microsoft interoperability. Technology partners of the Microsoft NAP and Cisco NAC ecosystems can also refer to the joint architecture for building or marketing solutions that work within the joint framework.
If the above description is making your eyes glaze over, here’s a short course courtesy of Paul F. Roberts at Infoworld:
Network access control technology allows companies to perform health checks on endpoint devices such as PCs and mobile devices before they are granted access to company networks. For example, worker PCs might be checked to make sure they are not infected with a virus, have up-to-date antivirus definitions, and a desktop firewall enabled before being allowed onto a corporate LAN.
Cisco first unveiled products that support its NAC architecture in June 2004. Since then it has slowly expanded NAC support from routers to switches and introduced a NAC appliance, formerly known as “Clean Access.” Microsoft’s Network Admission Protection (NAP) client health screening architecture has always been linked to its upcoming desktop and server operating system releases Vista and Longhorn, both due in 2007.
In the face of strong customer pressure to simplify the competing architectures, the two companies said in October, 2004 that they would integrate NAC and NAP.
Hit the link for more, but per the press release above there are now three competing solutions so the games have just started.
