Cisco Demos Collaboration
At C-Scape, Cisco’s global analyst conference held in San Jose, Cisco focused on collaboration, which it refers to as “co-labor,” or working toward a common goal. Cisco has always been a great example of a company that uses its own technology (“drinking its own champagne”), and collaboration technologies are no exception. In fact, the use of collaborative tools are being used not only among Cisco employees, but the real cheerleader for these technologies is John Chambers, who uses telepresence, video, blogs, video streaming, Web 2.0, and other collaborative tools on a regular basis.
At C-Scape, Cisco demonstrated how Cisco employees are using some of these collaborative technologies, which combine unified communications, video, and Web 2.0 technologies. A demonstration by “demo master extraordinaire” Jim Grubb, showed MyCisco, a web page that aggregates information where users can view their tasks, voice and email messages, blogs, podcasts, WebEx Connect spaces, communities, news, etc. When users log into their MyCisco page, they can publish and view content, such as blogs, videos, recent activities, discussion forums, documents posted, etc. Users can also join communities of interest (which may exist temporarily for a specific project, or more long-term based on your job role, location, etc.) enabling users to join or create communities in order to work on cross-functional activities, and to view content relevant to their community. Users can set up their presence status on that page, and can go to their community page where they can interact and collaborate with people in that community.
In addition to MyCisco, another collaborative tool is Ciscopedia, which provides the ability to find people in the company who are experts in the area you need and whom you can collaborate with. Ciscopedia lets you find the top experts on a particular subject, as well as how they’re rated and the areas that they participate in, enabling users to view the experts’ status, location, presence, etc. Ciscopedia can also be tied in with Cisco UC and WebEx Connect, allowing users to get pop up windows (screen pop) when people call, providing their profile and other information. It can show users’ presence information, enable users to click to dial, and see the different communications tools that are available.
Ciscopedia is an enterprise version of social networking tools (Ciscopedia is described as essentially like Facebook for the enterprise), and is based on wiki fundamentals, plus open source technology and some existing Cisco capabilities that Cisco tied together to make available inside the enterprise.
Again illustrating how Cisco uses these technologies, Rob Lloyd, Senior Vice President, US, Canada, Japan, discussed how Cisco is taking new models to partners through collaboration. A new collaborative channel model leverages collaboration and Web 2.0 in new ways to transform channel relationships. For example, Cisco Partner Connect uses Webex Connect’s workspace for partners to share documents and information. Lloyd noted that there’s been a 60% increase in the efficiency of Cisco resources based on Partner Connect.
While these collaborative tools, including UC and Web 2.0, are providing tremendous value to Cisco, the challenge for not only Cisco but for all UC vendors, is to convince customers that they can have similar benefits, and that they can actually save money by investing in these technologies.