Cisco’s PostPath Announcement

Posted by Blair Pleasant, on August 27, 2008

Cisco announced its intent to acquire PostPath, which provides email and calendaring software and is seen as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. PostPath bills itself as a replacement or supplement to Outlook, allowing for mixed Outlook and webmail deployments, with cross-server addressing, calendaring and public folders, providing a full Web 2.0 functionality. The software is interoperable with many email offerings, and has native compatibility with Outlook and Exchange. PostPath also offers a browser-independent AJAX web client, and is compatible with many mobile clients including Blackberry.

According to Alex Hadden-Boyd, Director of Marketing at Cisco WebEx, Cisco acquired PostPath to extend its collaboration products with PostPath’s email solution and web client. Cisco’s press release claims “PostPath will enhance the existing email and calendaring capabilities of Cisco's WebEx Connect collaboration platform.”
With PostPath's software, Cisco will extend the e-mail and calendar functionality of its flexible software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based collaborative platform that includes instant messaging, voice, video, data, document management and Web 2.0 applications. This combination will enable customers to use collaboration to accelerate business processes, within and between businesses.

"The acquisition of PostPath complements our strategy to develop an integrated collaboration platform designed for how we work today and into the future, providing real productivity gains and a more satisfying user experience", said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group. "Our 'cloud-based' delivery model offers our customers rapid deployment and compelling economics."

Cisco’s WebEx Connect portfolio currently offers IM, team spaces, document sharing, and more, and PostPath’s capabilities will expand this to include email and calendaring, all offered in an SaaS model. Hadden-Boyd noted that the PostPath employees will join WebEx in the Collaboration software group in Cisco, which makes sense.
It’s important to recognize Cisco’s direction in the Software as a Service (SaaS) world, which WebEx is the force behind. Cisco has been betting big on SaaS for collaboration, and its acquisition of PostPath reinforces this strategy. I’ve been trying out WebEx Connect for the past few days, and it has impressive capabilities. The addition of the new functionality that PostPath provides will be useful both to customers using WebEx Connect and to those who want an alternative to Microsoft.

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Comment posted by Marty Parker, on August 28, 2008

Good coverage, Blair. As you know, I believe that Cisco's continued investment in their collaboration products is a major roadmap directional shift for Cisco.

It is hard to determine, at this point, whether this direction is a complement to or an alternative to their IP PBX suite of products. As Cisco creates an integrated SaaS suite, it will become a more and more viable alternative to the enterprise server suite that requires five or six different servers (different types, not just the number of servers).

On this basis, it seems to me that many customers may choose to perform their basic voice communications with an on-premise PBX while filling their UC needs (since UC solutions are usually independent of the PBX) via the SaaS services (or at least via an on-site appliance that interfaces to the SaaS).

It will be interesting to watch.

Thanks, again. Marty Parker

Comment posted by brendan adams, on August 29, 2008

It strikes me that this acquisition covers several bases at once, not least the expansion of the SaaS portfolio under Webex. What is intriguing me at the moment however, is just where will they go next? A key area where Cisco is weak and will come under threat, is the 'business application' arena. By that, I mean simply things like Word, Excel, Powerpoint etc, as Cisco has no alternate here yet, but is likely to face 'risk' from the likes of MS, IBM, Google and all the others as collaboration takes greater hold, and they press forward with their own UC portfolios. I can see some interesting things developing, and certainly expect to see Cisco move more to the User Application side.