Tuesday, December 8, 2009

The Big FIght IBM Google Cisco Microsoft

I had recently gone through some market studies that attest the dynamic nature of the markets. The World's premier organizations are groveling all over the floor in an attempt to dominate one another. One slip and we can say good bye to that company. Being in one of the companies, I can see the intense level of competition and the volatility of trust that exists between them

A wonder in all this is that it is still unbelievable that they co-exist in this turmoil. Apart from this regular feature, there are the recessions to also look out for. All companies invest into risk so that they obtain maximum dividends from it. There is a saying in Finance which goes " The more risk you are ready to take, the more money that you can earn" and we can see the the major organizations ready to invest greater percentages in risk . But before we take the literal meaning of risk, we got to understand that there is no risk that companies jump into the well without knowing its depth. The only concern that is present is whether they should or should not take these calculated risks. The benefits are innumerable but they do have their shortcomings. One major risk that had spurned this recent recession was the suprime crisis. Lets discuss that later on another post but coming back to our mainstay topic.

A typical example of such rivalry is between IBM,Google and Microsoft. Now, we have found that Cisco also wants to join this elite group with its new product WebEx Mail.It iss a hosted e-mail application that lets customers move from Microsoft Exchange but continue to access e-mail through an Outlook client if they desire. Enterprise Collaboration Platform is a hodgepodge of tools with which companies are already familiar, including team spaces and communities, profiles, a corporate directory, and social networking tools. Cisco also unveiled a Show and Share video app and a tagging solution called Pulse. This is coincidental to google's recent unvealing of Google Apps Sync which allows people to shift to Google Apps using either their own interface or that of Microsoft Outlook.

Cisco is pitting Enterprise Collaboration Platform as an alternative to IBM Lotus Connections and wiki platforms from MindTouch, Socialtext, Jive Software, Awareness and others that have similar tools. Show and Share has promise, given Cisco's enterprise video chops.Yet Google has Google Video for businesses, and MindTouch offers an extension to Kaltura to offer video for enterprises. Pulse is nice, but IBM Lotus Connections has offered its Dogear bookmarking tool for a few years now. According to Cisco, collaboration world has been focusing on documents and PCs within the confines of the company firewall. He argued that Cisco is bringing video collaboration not just to PCs, but to phones and mobile devices using telepresence between corporate firewalls.

So, while previously Cisco focused on letting employees within big businesses work together efficiently, Cisco is applying its network security provisions to its collaboration software to let colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers work together across their firewalls.This "intercompany collaboration" is the theme for Cisco's Collaboration tool. Pulse, he said, is a search app that analyzes network data in motion, looking at who is talking to whom to "learn the social graph" associated with corporate networks. Pulse, for example, indexes Web surfing behavior and YouTube videos and tags them based on social relevance. They can tag information and assign it social relevance based on the info flowing through the network, don't have to be in the application either on the server or on the client.

Fair enough. So how is Show and Share different? Cisco said the app was built with enterprise scale from the start.Unlike Google video for enterprise and others of its ilk, Show and Share is on-premises, not hosted. It also boasts several security permission levels, from department to workgroup to companywide.There is also one-click recording from telepresence solutions like Cisco WebEx Connect, Cisco's Flip consumer digital camera or smartphones. Users can create chapters or upload a transcript, making clips more production-ready.This makes editing much easier and is a departure from apps such as Adobe Premier. Finally, Show and Share can work with enterprise content distribution networks from Akamai.This means large businesses can push the video clip into a branch, so that when people press play, they can watch the video without impacting the wide area network because the clip is local.

Pulse and Show and Share sound like unique products, but they also seem as if they were meant to work together: social tagging with enterprise video. Pulse and Show and Share, while not currently interoperable in their first release, will be integrated to work together.

Consumers will eagerly wait as their choices are multiplying with newer technologies pouncing upon each other to gain the upper hand in the market. This is a good time for a company to invest in one of the products as all of them are eager to sell fast to prove their unquestionable dominance..

1 comment:

  1. for more info ,
    http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/IBM-is-Closer-to-Building-Bluehouse-to-Compete-With-Cisco-Google-Microsoft/


    http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Messaging-and-Collaboration/How-Ciscos-Network-Supercharges-Collaboration-Versus-Google-IBM-Microsoft-726574/

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