RSSIs there room for Cisco in the online office suite space?
A single line in reports on a Tuesday conference call with Cisco VP Doug Dennerline opens up the intriguing possibility that the company is "thinking about" getting into the online office pool with Google, Microsoft, Zoho, and other SaaS providers. It's probably too much to read into what may have been meant as a throwaway comment or an expression of individual interest, and probably quite responsibly most coverage has focused on other news of interest in the call, such as the company's overall cloud strategy (what, your company doesn't have a cloud strategy? Are you crazy, don't you know that everyone has to have a cloud strategy now?) of focusing on the top and bottom layers: cloud hardware infrastructure, which the company hopes to become a prominent supplier of with it's California blade servers, and services, which will anchor around the existing WebEx solution and expand from there.
Dennerline was talking about one of those options for expansion on the base of WebEx when he said the company was interested in the online office space. At first blush, it sounds like another "me too" moment, a big company keeping competitors off-balance by throwing its hat in the ring or just keeping the options open for future moves in that direction. But the more I think about it, the more I think Cisco may be ideally suited (at least in some respects) to launch a serious contender to Google and Microsoft in the enterprise online office suite market.
Cisco has two significant advantages in this game that the others are each lacking one of; unlike Microsoft, they have no institutional or financial interest in maintaining the status quo of desktop based office suites, or at least not a very significant interest. And unlike Google, Cisco is both oriented and practiced at working with enterprise customers, both in structuring and delivering deals and in providing support for them thereafter. A major failing of Microsoft's solution is that it isn't "cloud" enough; a major failing of Google's is that they continue to call it and treat it like a beta. These factors diminish the attraction of those solutions to enterprise customers, even as the utility computing concept in general dangles promises of significant savings in front of them.
Cisco probably has a twelve to eighteen month window to introduce a significant, enterprise-grade web-based office suite into the market which could leverage its existing reputation and relationships with enterprise customers to up-end both Google and Microsoft in their respective plays and come out ahead in the online office race. The predominance of WebEx as a corporate solution gives them an easy in; their support and service structure could be enough to make it stick.
I think they have a golden opportunity to get in the game and light the market on fire. But then, it was just a single sentence.
Very relevant and accurate comments concerning Microsoft and Google in this space.