Discussing Spark with Zeus
Cisco made several announcements today at its annual Collaboration Summit in San Francisco.
Zeus Kerravala and I discuss them in this video.
These announcements are in alignment with Cisco’s stated vision to “Deliver a single collaboration experience that spans all modes of communication.”
These announcements indicate:
- That Spark is central to Cisco’s collaboration strategy. It was only launched a year ago (Project Square), and today it’s front and central.
- Cisco is shifting to directly hosting its cloud service. HCS was an indirect cloud model – equipment sales to providers. The indirect model results with inconsistencies in delivered services and experiences. Microsoft has done the same, but Cisco may have the upperhand with providers.
- Cisco intends to leverage its huge installed base to accelerate adoption of messaging and specifically Spark (in Ciscospeak it’s called value extension). This could put some slack in Slack’s demand.
- If we dissect the above vision we get three parts: Experience, multi-modal, and communications. For the past two years Cisco has been stressing experience. These announcements put more emphasis the second two.
- Cisco, MicroSoft, and Mitel are all beating different drums -and none of them are the UC drum.
- The differences between Microsoft and Cisco are widening. Simply stated Microsoft is expertly skating to where the puck is (Office, Exchange, Cloud) and Cisco is skating to where Cisco thinks the puck is headed (messaging centric/WCC, cloud, mobile).
Related Links:
Look ma, no ads!
Admit it! You just can’t look away. Yet, there’s so much more.
Become a subscriber to TalkingPointz for access to reports and premium posts.
There are several ways to stay informed:
- Visit this site regularly.
- Receive new posts in your email once a week.
- Become an Insider or All Access Subscriber for alerts and access to uncensored content.
TalkingHeadz Podcast
The TalkingHeadz podcasts are @DaveMichels and @EvanKirstel chatting with interesting guests. These are unsponsored and unscripted for your enjoyment. You can subscribe on most podcast apps including iTunes.
TalkingHeadz Podcast with Anand Janefalkar, UJET
Running any startup is a tough business. Running a CCaaS is even tougher. It has all the joys of other startups (funding, growing pains, establishing a brand, recruiting managers and employees, and building a product) further complicated by established (entrenched)…
Leave a Comment