APAC big market for collaboration tools: Cisco

New Collaboration Portfolio

The new collaboration portfolio is designed to help companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation With the global recession having a major impact on the US companies, Cisco, the leaders in routers and switches sees a high growth in the Asia-Pacific region for the new collaboration portfolio that helps companies accelerate business processes, increase productivity and speed innovation.

Targeting the current $34 billion global market for what are called collaboration products, Cisco said it will target users, particularly on the move, delivering the applications across platforms like Windows, Mac OS, and even mobile phones running on Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows OS. The market for such tools and services is projected to grow to $48 billion by 2011.
Reports indicate that it is slated as the fastest growing advanced technology in Cisco's product portfolio. The new collaboration portfolio is now looking at emerging countries in Asia like India, China, Middle East, Russia, South Africa as high growth markets. The company has initially rolled out 40 products and 800 capabilities that are very significant for the Indian market.

Talking to CIOL, Manjula Talreja, VP, strategy & business operations, software group, Cisco said, "even though the foundation for this product was laid in the US and so has about 70 percent market share, still more than 30 percent comes from the emerging markets spread across Asia-Pac, Africa, South America. But in the coming years it is likely that it will become a 50:50 ration."

The US slowdown could help increase the numbers in the emerging markets to achieve this target sooner, says Talreja.

The networking giant said the new set of tools would enable enterprises and executives to work across platforms and devices seamlessly wherever they are.

The company is tapping on companies in particular verticals like IT, ITES, manufacturing, government, services, retail and heathcare for deployment these advanced technologies.
The new set of tools comprising Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx Connect, are designed to integrate with existing IT infrastructure, web services and business application to allow users customise applications and services.

The new set of collaboration products use the network as a platform to inter-operate with business applications, communication devices and web-based tools.

"Cisco collaboration strategy is a fusion of unified communication technology, video, telepresence and web 2.0 technologies that will accelerate business processes and speed up innovation," said Ranajoy Punja, VP, business development advanced technologies, Cisco India, SAARC.

The acquisition of the Santa Clara-based WebEx Communication Inc followed by and calendaring company PostPath Inc and IM firm Jabber Inc helped Cisco roll out the current products.
"Collaboration is the next phase of Internet and the centre of this phase is the network. Our network platform uses open-standards protocols to expose critical collaboration services like instant messaging," said Don Proctor, senior VP, software group, Cisco.

He said the portfolio will use this network architecture to create an integrated collaboration experience that has everything from simple text messaging to Cisco TelePresence sessions.