Cisco Systems is extending the functionality of its Quad enterprise social networking (ESN) software through integration with Microsoft Office applications and with email clients, including Microsoft Outlook, the company is announcing on Tuesday.
Cisco is also re-branding the ESN software, dropping its Quad name and calling it WebEx Social, as the company seeks to give its social collaboration products a uniform brand using the WebEx name.
"Creating a consistent [collaboration] brand and experience under WebEx is a necessary thing for them to do," said industry analyst Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.
Cisco is also placing under the WebEx umbrella its Callway cloud-hosted telepresence service, the original WebEx online meeting and Web conferencing service, and the cloud-based Connect IM and presence service. Callway will now be known as WebEx Telepresence, while WebEx will be called WebEx Meetings, and Connect is being renamed WebEx Messenger.
"There's no doubt that Cisco had too many [collaboration] platforms. That's how they grew the business, through acquisitions," Kerravala said.
WebEx Social, like other ESN applications from companies like IBM, Jive Software, Tibbr and Yammer, lets organizations offer their employees Facebook-like and Twitter-like functionality but adapted for a workplace setting so that they can, in theory, communicate and collaborate more effectively.
ESN software is designed to complement traditional workplace communication and collaboration tools, like email, IM and Web conferencing with employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, discussion forums, wikis, brainstorming software, recommendations, ratings, joint document editing and annotation, tagging and links.
Interest in ESN software has been growing in recent years, and Forrester Research recently forecasted that spending on these products will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent through 2016, a year in which this market will reach US$6.4 billion, compared with $600 million in 2010.
Kerravala predicts that ESN will be one of the biggest trends in IT over the next five years. "It will change the way people work," he said.
ESN will be used for many communication and collaboration tasks for which email is ineffective. "It will create a much more interactive way of working than what you have now with email," he said.
Cisco, which is making the announcement at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, will now let WebEx Social users collaborate on, share and jointly edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.
In addition, users will be able to perform certain WebEx Social actions, like creating, emailing and posting updates to their activity streams, from within Microsoft Outlook and SMTP-compliant email clients.
Cisco is also re-branding the ESN software, dropping its Quad name and calling it WebEx Social, as the company seeks to give its social collaboration products a uniform brand using the WebEx name.
"Creating a consistent [collaboration] brand and experience under WebEx is a necessary thing for them to do," said industry analyst Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst at ZK Research.
Cisco is also placing under the WebEx umbrella its Callway cloud-hosted telepresence service, the original WebEx online meeting and Web conferencing service, and the cloud-based Connect IM and presence service. Callway will now be known as WebEx Telepresence, while WebEx will be called WebEx Meetings, and Connect is being renamed WebEx Messenger.
"There's no doubt that Cisco had too many [collaboration] platforms. That's how they grew the business, through acquisitions," Kerravala said.
WebEx Social, like other ESN applications from companies like IBM, Jive Software, Tibbr and Yammer, lets organizations offer their employees Facebook-like and Twitter-like functionality but adapted for a workplace setting so that they can, in theory, communicate and collaborate more effectively.
ESN software is designed to complement traditional workplace communication and collaboration tools, like email, IM and Web conferencing with employee profiles, activity streams, microblogging, discussion forums, wikis, brainstorming software, recommendations, ratings, joint document editing and annotation, tagging and links.
Interest in ESN software has been growing in recent years, and Forrester Research recently forecasted that spending on these products will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 61 percent through 2016, a year in which this market will reach US$6.4 billion, compared with $600 million in 2010.
Kerravala predicts that ESN will be one of the biggest trends in IT over the next five years. "It will change the way people work," he said.
ESN will be used for many communication and collaboration tasks for which email is ineffective. "It will create a much more interactive way of working than what you have now with email," he said.
Cisco, which is making the announcement at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, will now let WebEx Social users collaborate on, share and jointly edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.
In addition, users will be able to perform certain WebEx Social actions, like creating, emailing and posting updates to their activity streams, from within Microsoft Outlook and SMTP-compliant email clients.
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