Cisco Extends Collaboration Reach

In addition, Cisco is announced a new prosumer version of its Flip video recorder, called the Minnow Pro, and the ability to access its Webex conferencing services from any browser.

After initially launching its collaboration platform, now marketed under the name Quad, late last year, Cisco is now making the offering more widely available in five countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and New Zealand.

The latest version of Quad will add support for both the Apple iPhone and Apple iPad in addition to a range of other mobile computing devices in the future.

The cloud computing service, called FocalPoint, is designed to give customers an easy way to share and store video created using Flip in a way that makes it easier to manage and keep track of that content.
According to Murali Sitaram, Cisco vice president and general manager for the Enterprise Collaboration Platform Group, the foundation of Cisco’s collaboration strategy is built around an XMMP protocol that Cisco acquired when it purchased Jabber in 2008.

That protocol will not only be extended to unify all of Cisco’s various collaboration offerings, he said, it will also be used to integrate third-party products as well. Sitaram said that open standards evolve in the collaboration space, Cisco will work to support those protocols as well and expects to contribute to their development.

Sitaram says Cisco sees collaboration as a major investment area, with the company planning on adding analytics capabilities to help organizations discover business relationships, tools for search video and audio, the ability to federate collaboration services across multiple organizations, and support for data access and governance technologies.