Cisco's Post-PC UC Makeover

Cisco, along with countless other vendors and pundits, like to toss around the “post-PC era” concept.

On the verge of 2012, few people are still expecting PCs to go extinct. Like the dinosaurs, they will likely become tomorrow’s sharks and alligators: ancient evolutionary branches that survive the mass extinction and go on to occupy some future niche.

That mass extinction is being caused by ultramobility, of course.

As tablets and smartphones move to increasingly displace even laptop systems, companies are being challenged to find ways to make these new form factors ever more productive and better integrated into business operations. One vector for this improvement is communications and collaboration as exemplified by the rise of the unified communications (UC) concept. . Thus, it’s no surprise that Cisco recently announced a new wave of enhancements to its instant messaging and presence client, Jabber, along with its conferencing and collaboration product, Webex.

Jabber dates back over a decade and gained fame as an open client platform for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). Cisco purchase the commercialized Jabber XCP in 2008 as a forward-looking improvement over the old model of having to plug a network phone or telepresence device into Cisco’s Communications Manager. Jabber quickly became Cisco’s way to provide secure voice and video across Windows PCs, Macs, smartphones, and tablets of every major stripe. The client now also includes voicemail, desktop sharing, and more, much outgrowing its original VoIP roots.

At Cisco Collaboration Summit 2011, the company announced the next stage in Jabber’s evolution.

“Now you can take Jabber and embed it in Web applications using a browser plug-in,” says Michael Smith, group director for collaboration solutions at Cisco. “We think that’s going to show up in two places. One is when people start to embed Jabber in line-of-business applications, like ERP or finance. We’re taking those core capabilities—IM, presence, click to call, click to video call—and putting it right into your ERP and such. The other place is when people add Jabber into public, Web-based applications, like Gmail. Gmail has a gadget-based user interface, so we created a plug-in gadget, and now I can use my softphone for click-to-call, five-digit dialing, corporate dialing from my corporate address book—all within Gmail.”

Cisco Communications Manager is still in the background keeping communications secure. The user begins with a VPN connection, logs into Communications Manager, and then Communications Manager safeguards the plug-in operating inside of Gmail or any other desired application. The Jabber SDK also allows for integration into packages such as Microsoft Office, so documents can reveal author presence status and such, just as Microsoft Lync does. SDK updates planned for Q1 of 2012 should bring HD video calling, click-to-join a telepresence room, and additional telephony controls.

With Webex, the new enhancements may be even more compelling. With exasperation clearly born from long practice, Cisco’s Smith describes how the first five to ten minutes of online group meetings are inevitably lost to people making sure they have the right documents, sending receiving, version checking, and so on.

“This next version of Webex revolves around ‘Prepare, Meet, and Follow-up,’” he says. “To do that, we created something called Meeting Spaces, which is a persistent document library that allows you to store information, share it with people in the meeting, and search through it. I also have IM and presence available, so if I’m going to be a couple of minutes late to the meeting, I can IM you and say so, or I can post comments or requests. We’re expanding beyond the real-time experience to accommodate the complementary asynchronous experience.”

Cisco already has two-way Webex video on the iPad, and now that capability is extending to the iPhone and Cisco’s own Cius tablet. The company is also announcing Webex VoIP capability for essentially every major mobile device platform, thus liberating participants from having to view on one device and call in for voice on another.

Beyond the immediate news, these Jabber and Webex enhancements point to a much longer and larger effort within Cisco. Everything the company does eventually comes back to making more and better use of the network.

The Cius tablet isn’t out to “out iPad the iPad”; its purpose is to help workers use networking to become ever more productive and profitable. The Jabber and Webex applications are no different. Cisco is pushing for more mobility, more social integration, more HD video, and more dovetailing with existing business applications. In the enterprise world, we suspect that communications vendors who don’t see the reason of this strategy will soon find themselves becoming the next wave of dinosaur extinctions.

William Van Winkle has been a full-time tech writer and author since 1998. He specializes in a wide range of coverage areas, including unified communications, virtualization, Cloud Computing, storage solutions and more. William lives in Hillsboro, Oregon with his wife and 2.4 kids, and—when not scrambling to meet article deadlines—he enjoys reading, travel, and writing fiction.