Friday, March 16, 2007

Cisco buys Webex

Lol - at first glance it looks like the return of the 'buybble' (and yes that is my word- i created it, if i see it in an article it better be followed by an accreditation to me :)

So Cisco bought a seemingly unrelated company and everyone is running around saying WTF???

I mean Webex has been around forever and at $3.2billion dollars this isn't a small whim of a decision.

I have to admit so was I for the first few hours; I even floated a joke idea that the acquisition strategy is being driven by the Treasury Department in Cisco who have so much cash in the bank just sitting there they decided the ROI on the acquisition was higher than the T bills they are currently invested in.

ha ha.

Until I remembered about one of my favourite 'almost idea' companies. Check out my post about Cisco buying Orative in October last year http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/orative.html

In simple terms Orative is a mobile phone application that enables you to determine whether the people in your office are "on the phone", "logged off" or available for your call through the use of your SIP presence status on an IP handset.

Now whilst we are yet to see the resulting "borganisation" of Orative once it's been re-branded as Cisco when you put Orative and webex together you can see their strategy.

It's really simple and yet brilliant.

From either a desktop or any other kind of application they want to enable you to be able to communicate via voice conferencing, video conferencing or desktop share conferencing your message or presentation.

To be able to move from a 'chat session' (anyone know if Cisco has bought an IM platform like MS LCS or Jabber etc?- if not start buying stocks in the likely suspects, it has to be coming soon) to a voice session to a video conference with desktop share using Webex it will all be available.....but only if you use Cisco phones (take that Polycom :)

Cheers,
Dean

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