A New Focus: My Visit with Cisco’s Customer Collaboration Business Unit

We have all experienced it. You are in a business meeting and you spy an acquaintance you have not seen in a long while. You get to talking and you notice that there has been a marked change in your friend. Your old closed-off friend is now more open and has a wider view of the world. That is what it felt like after attending the Cisco Customer Collaboration Business Unit (CCBU) analyst day on June 16. It had been a while since I had a good sit-down with Ross Daniels and the CCBU team and as we started talking, I realized just how much things have changed at Cisco and specifically with the CCBU.

The CCBU product direction is more inclusive and collaborative, with more of a focus on bringing the contact center into broader enterprise, extending the enterprise into the contact center, and creating opportunities for collaboration between the customers, the contact center, and other business units. Even the business unit’s name changed from the Contact Center Business Unit to the Customer Collaboration Business Unit reflecting its new product direction. All this is an outgrowth of Cisco’s “One Cisco” corporate philosophy. Over the past few years, the company has moved away from a traditional development approach to a broad multifunctional and many-to-many approach. The company’s philosophy of creating cross-function councils and the incorporation of the CCBU into the Enterprise, Commercial, and Small Business council allowed it to share effectively resources and ideas with the UC and Televideo business units. This broad-view process is beginning to show promise in its contact center applications. “One Cisco” has begun to expand the target of Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE), Unified Conctact Center Express (UCCX), and Customer Voice Portal (CVP) from agents/customer communications to building engagements between the customer and the entire enterprise.

An important part of this new open philosophy is building new avenues to connect the contact center and its data with the rest of the enterprise and to partner solutions. One new application, Pulse, is a data dictionary containing information about agents and enterprise workers. It is a central depository that solutions such as Unified Contact Center Express, Expert Advisor, and workforce management systems can tap into and receive the information to needed route calls, escalate issues, or create schedules. Another new application, a multimedia capture and processing system, is a virtual machine that provides complete recording of all interaction whether the customer uses CVP-based self-service or is passed onto an agent or to an expert. Multimedia capture and processing splits the data and voice streams of agent interactions into duplicate streams, sending one on its merry way between the agents and caller, and sending the other into a central repository where it can be accessed by workforce optimization solutions, for example. Finally, Cisco’s Unified Intelligence Server, which is not actually now, combines the contact center data (and data from Pulse and the multimedia capture and processing system) with other enterprise data and data from external sources to provide an enterprise-wide, extra-enterprise, and market view of contact center operation and business positions. With these three systems, Cisco begins to create contact center solutions with a broader and more open focus.

There has lot has been written about Quad and I cannot add too much detail here. Except, Quad’s open nature provides for all sort of possibilities for contact centers, not in the least using social media to provide an escalation process and simplifying what is now called CTI. Quad’s Web 2.0 foundations and SIP structures enable contact centers to build data sharing processes (formally known as CTI) incorporating corporate databases, presence servers, and unified communications solutions. In addition, using a mash-up server, external data, such as a public LinkedIn profile or FourSquare data, can be incorporated into the agent screen, providing information agents can use to provide better service or offer targeted discounts.

As you speak with your friend and take in the changes he has undergone, you also realize that he has not discarded all of his old, closed ways. Cisco’s new openness and its new open application are good starts, but the company has a significant amount of work still to do. The company’s needs to increase the openness of its original contact center solutions, UCCE, UCCX, and CVP. While they all support SIP and other open protocols, the solutions are difficult to integrate into a multivendor environment and require many servers. Furthermore, the routing engines need a significant amount of improvement to me more competitive against rivals such as Avaya and Genesys. At the current time, the bits and pieces of the new portfolio are not in coherent packages or solutions, making sales, pricing, and installation confusing and complex. Finally, notwithstanding the challenges facing Cisco’s major competitor, Avaya is still the by far the contact center market leader in all regions with upwards to 50% of the market (which includes Nortel’s). The gap between Cisco’s 11% and Avaya’s 50% is a large difference to span. While, there are many opportunities and Cisco will make some headway, it will be very difficult to make significant inroads before Avaya finds a more secure footing. Finally, Cisco’s market leading data networking and communications business units still over shadow the Cisco CCBU, making gains in mindshare that much more difficult.

As you and your friend part ways, you realize that the good and not so good parts of the old friend are still there, but he has made real progress. In the time since I last spent time with the CCBU, Cisco had made real progress and improvements, but like the old friend, some of the old “not so good” parts are still there. It is hard to say what the future holds, but I think, given these new developments, it will be an interesting one to watch unfold.