Cisco Quad

In the light of the recent HP story, it's interesting to watch what's happening in another IT giant - Cisco. Like HP, Cisco was built on manufacturing computer hardware. The peak success of the company came in the early 2000's when Cisco passed Microsoft and became the most valuable company in the world. It was then called "the company that is building the Internet" because more than 80% of routers in the Internet were manufactured by Cisco. But then the company became the victim of it's own success.

Following the release of the business-oriented tablet, Cisco has invaded another new for them Enterprise 2.0 sphere - today the company announced the availability of the cloud platform Cisco Hosted Collaboration. However, the platform is very specialized - it's intended only for hosting of Cisco's solutions: Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Telepresence, Cisco Unified Contact Center and Cisco Quad. And the hosted applications will be managed not by the customers themselves and not by Ciscom but by Cisco's partners. The platform will provide partners with a virtualized environment where they can quickly install multiple application instances on single server and offer them to multiple customers. Of course, this scheme will make Cisco's solution implementations less expensive and long-term, and will allow the partners to provide a subscription model.

It's not a secret that the iPad has no camera, because Steve Jobs hopes to collect another $1K from his loyal customers for this feature in next version. And most likely, he would succeed in the consumer market, but the enterprise market is now a big question. Because mobile videoconferencing - is the main advantage of such tablets over netbooks and smartphones for business. And because today Cisco introduced its tablet Cisco Cius, targeted directly at web-conferencing and business video applications. First of all - Cisco business apps: Webex, Quad, Cisco Telepresence. But since the device is running Android OS - it is open for solutions from any vendor.