Ciscollaboration

Cisco released a slew of collaboration products this week. First, of course, there’s Cisco’s WebEx Mail, a replacement for MS Exchange that integrates with Outlook. There’s the Enterprise Collaboration Platform, essentially a social-networking/company portal kind of thingy that competes with MS Sharepoint. And Enterprise Collaboration Platform is an alternative to IBM’s Lotus Connections.

There are some improvements on competitor’s offerings as well; for example, Cisco includes a service called “pulse” which analyzes social network data as it occurs, and tries to “learn the social graph” associated with corporate networks. And another service, called Show and Share, is sort of like an “internal YouTube” for companies. You can host videos internally and show them to anyone inside the company – but they’re not accessible from the outside – or hosted out on the public Internet. This is also integrated with recording solutions from telepresence to the “widdle iddy biddy” Flip Digital cameras.

It’s a crowded market – not only is Microsoft the established champion, but the scrappy Google has entered in the market as well, with Google Apps for Your Domain. The two approaches to unseat the Microsoft Exchange behemoth are very different, as Google’s solutions require moving things out to the cloud.

For various reasons, companies are often hesitant to trust Google – or any company – with sensitive information like business plans, payroll statistics, personal communications, and the incriminating video of last year’s Christmas Party that you really know you should delete but it’s just too good. There’s also the fact that publically traded companies have to have on-site backups of communications for governmental regulatory reasons anyway, so why not just host the whole thing onsite and eliminate the risk, if it’ll cost about the same anyway?

Cisco’s solutions also integrate with unified communications tools like voice, video, and instant messaging, meaning that the 10 minute phonecall at 10:00 a.m. can be on the network by 10:15 a.m. (Finally, communication tools that travel faster than gossip!)

What impact will these tools have on the network? It’s hard to say, really, depending on each particular enterprise. If companies just switch out one collaboration tool for another, it’s unlikely that there will be much of an increase in traffic. But in other scenarios, it’s difficult to suggest whether overall traffic levels will go up or down. For example, instead of e-mailing large video or audio files back and forth, a unified communications portal allows for a much more simplified “multicast” solution which would take up less bandwidth overall. Then again, the ease of multimedia communication might invite more people to create multimedia communications – thus increasing the amount of bandwidth taken.

One force or the other could dominate, or the two could cancel each other out. In either case, it continues to make a compelling case for maintaining monitoring solutions so that you can catch changes in traffic as they occur, and predict future needs.