Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Transcript for UC Summit 2011 Podcast

Transcript for UC Summit 2011 Podcast ; UCStrategies' Dave Michels interviews Tom Isaksen of Cisco following his keynote presentation at UC Summit 2011, held March 27-30 in La Jolla, CA. Cisco is a Platinum sponsor of UC Summit 2011.

Dave Michels: Hi, this is Dave Michels, I am with Tom Isaksen, a Business Development Manager from Cisco, who just presented a keynote at the UC Summit here in La Jolla, California. How are you doing, Tom?

Tom Isaksen: Doing great Dave, thanks so much.

Dave Michels: Let me ask you – your presentation was titled, The New Collaboration Experience. Is the notion of collaboration changing do you think?

Tom Isaksen: Yeah, we believe that the way that people collaborate is changing, they way they work is changing and these changes or transitions create opportunities for the companies that are able to capture those transitions and leverage them to change the way they are doing business, increase the efficiency of their business process, increase specific business outcomes, such as customer retention, customer loyalty, etc. So there are some changes taking place in technology that provide new ways of interacting, new places to interact and those are enabling this new workspace, which again represents a change in the way that people can collaborate.

Dave Michels: You also talked about consumerization and you mentioned the iPad, Twitter, and Facebook – these tools are growing and penetrating the enterprise clearly. Isn’t that enough? Do we need different enterprise tools?

Tom Isaksen: Well interoperability is a key piece of enabling a collaboration strategy and there are solutions from Cisco that will run on top of iPad and iPhones and Blackberries and the new Android platforms for supporting web interactions, be it WebEx or soft phones and so that’s a piece of it. We also, as you know, recently announced and we’re highlighting our Cius Android-based tablet. So the question that comes up is, are the consumer devices and consumer technologies out there the appropriate fit for enterprise customers and enterprise needs? In many cases that answer might be yes. We also believe there is a subset of the marketplace, a subset of enterprise customers, subset of public sector customers that face certain regulations or other requirements for privacy, security, reliability, etc. where there is a fit for specific applications, up to and including the Cius when it comes to tablets. So consumerization is a huge trend and we’re looking to enable our customers to leverage what consumerization is bringing to the enterprise market, while also recognizing that there are some unique traits in certain vertical markets that may benefit from enterprise-specific tools and applications.

Dave Michels: Now you mentioned Cius a few times there and you’ve also mentioned in your presentation, the WebEx for Android release – is Android becoming a central part of Cisco’s collaboration strategy?

Tom Isaksen: The Cius runs on Android; Android according to many industry analysts is now the number one smartphone operating system or mobile device operating system globally, so it certainly has some nice trajectory in terms of a user base, but we have the applications, as I say, for the Apple mobile platform, as well as for Macs, as well as for PCs, so we see Android as an important piece, but one of the many that we are supporting today and will continue to support in the future.

Dave Michels: Let me ask you a little bit about those mobile clients you are talking about. Now you announced just recently that you’ve rebundled most of these mobile clients into a new family called Jabber. Now, Jabber is mostly associated with XMPC or instant messaging. Can you clarify the intent of the Jabber name and what it includes?

Tom Isaksen: You bet. As you mentioned, Jabber was the company and the technology that we acquired a couple of years back that provided the federation between IM platforms, a federation in terms of the presence capabilities and we believe that it is a great brand to carry forward, as we apply it to that unified client strategy, so that we can provide a consistent user experience, whether they’re on their PC, on their Mac, on their iPhone, on their iPad, on their Android, or even their Blackberry device. And so the fact that we’ve unified that strategy, brought it together, reinforced that any device, any application, in any location-type of capability – that has been central to our collaboration go-to-market – the fact that we now provide that across all those devices, I think represents a great opportunity for us to leverage that Jabber brand that is known for interoperability, openness and federation.

Dave Michels: Now, going back to your collaboration strategy, you talked about social networks and the fact in your words, when you talked about Cisco Quad, you described it as the intersection of enterprise, social, and unified communications. How do enterprises benefit from social networks?

Tom Isaksen: Social networks democratize information and access to that information. Today, so many companies continue to operate in a siloed fashion, where product development may have great information, but customer service who is trying to service the customers that are using the products that product development brought to market – customer service may not have total access to that information that R&D has, or that engineering has, or that the field or deployment teams may have. And so this siloed information continues to be a drag on the productivity of an enterprise. It continues to hold back key business outcomes, such as customer satisfaction and so if you can use social media to break down the barriers for information flow across all pieces of a value chain, both internally within a company, but also externally through their partners, through their manufacturers, up to and including their customers themselves – then you’ve got the ability to drive significant productivity gains and other business outcomes.

Social media has been proven in a consumer space to provide that ability for any person to access any information from any device, from any location they may be. And combined with the ability of searching for information, searching for expertise that we’re all familiar with from any web application, you put those together in an enterprise social software solution and you are going to enable enterprises to leverage the enterprise-wide information, to more rapidly, more efficiently meet the needs of their customers and we see it as a great fit for enterprise social software. As you mentioned, I was showing how enterprise social software combined with unified communications, delivers a perfect storm of capabilities. The access to enterprise information from enterprise social software and the ability to click-to-call, click-to-conference, click-to-video, click–to-meet, click-to-collaborate from the UC piece and you put the two together, it's a very powerful combination of capabilities.

Dave Michels: Let’s talk a little bit more about that because social is evolving and meaning different things to different enterprises and at first, the first layer is kind of what you are describing here, this ability to share information. Then comes this form of brand management, where you are monitoring public networks and understanding what people are saying about your brands. But you touched on something different with your tarantula video, you talked about increasing revenue. Can you elaborate on that?

Tom Isaksen: There are companies that recognize today that their brands are being impacted by what customers and consumers are saying out in social media. And whether it's a fan ranting or raving about a product in Facebook, whether it is somebody posting a positive or negative experience in Twitter about a product or service – those represent branding opportunities, but if managed properly may also provide revenue opportunities for perhaps up-sell or cross-sell to a happy customer who is promoting your brand or promoting your service in Facebook or Twitter.

Now in the tarantula video, which always gets a bunch of chuckles, we see somebody who is posting on Facebook, tweeting on Twitter, looking on Youtube and other places for information about tarantulas and it is a exterminator service who happens to be looking for key words about spiders or tarantulas and they see that as a revenue-generating opportunity. I think that case is a strong one. You see companies today investing in analytics around key word searches or analytics around key search terms with the expectation that if they can get the right combination of words, that is a advertising or buying opportunity and we would think that the exact same thing applies, if we start using more intelligent mining of the information that people are posting out there in Twitter, Facebook, and other pieces of the social media.

Dave Michels: All right, well we’re just about out of time. I just want to touch on one last thing. You talked about the Cisco CMB 3000, your new telephony system for the mid-market. Now this is a far simpler and economical solution than other Cisco voice solutions. Can you elaborate on the intent of this product?

Tom Isaksen: We have been listening to our resellers, our partners. We have been listening to the marketplace and have take that input to heart and have come to market with the BE3000 that targets an enterprise-class subset of voice-focused features at a very attractive price point for the mid-market. Some of the market analysis we’ve done shows that there is a $5 billion opportunity between 100 and 1,000 stations and the BE3000 points directly at that piece. Now while it doesn’t represent the vast transition that some of the other topics we’ve covered represent, it does represent some changes in that Cisco is aggressively going after SMB voice market. We are able to deliver a street price of approximately $100 per user, including the phone and the licensing, and we’ve come up with design, development, deployment process that is extremely easy, so that there is a great revenue opportunity for our resellers. The ability to scale that and to drive a very profitable business in that SMB segment. So we are seeing some good feedback from our resellers on that announcement and look forward to working with them as that comes to market.

Dave Michels: From the UCStrategies Team, Blair Pleasant and myself were involved in researching the CMB 3000 and we’ve got a detailed analysis coming out on that fairly shortly and I think it is a really interesting product and I think it's also a fairly interesting channel play. But with that we need to wrap it up and again, thank you Tom for coming out to La Jolla and thank you for the podcast.

Tom Isaksen: Dave, thanks so much, I will look forward to next year.

Related Post:

Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)