Cisco Systems recently announced its Facebook-like collaboration platform. Cisco Quad aims at enterprises that want to boost productivity, stimulate innovation, and integrate distributed teams through secure social collaboration.
With Quad, Cisco distinguishes four forms of systems where people “live” at work: Content creation and documents, communicating, business transactions, and social systems like crowd sourcing, blogs, wikis and communities. Cisco is positioning its open social-media engine at the heart of these systems to integrate all four worlds.
Cisco’s research shows social software for business is an $800 million market, but will grow to about $1.2 billion within a couple of years. There are also adjacent markets around enterprise social software, including content management, portals and search. Cisco predicts the unified communications market and the collaboration market will fuse. Quad is Cisco’s early entrance into that market.
Cisco Quad in Action
Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager for Cisco’s Enterprise Collaboration Platform, said companies with as few as 500 employees can benefit from Quad because almost every company is about creating products or services — and that requires people with different skill sets coming together. That said, Sitaram does see value for specific organizations.
“If you’re in human resources, you’re focused on retaining talent or making sure that retiring talent doesn’t take the knowledge with them, and the whole employee life cycle is important,” Sitaram said. “If you are a customer-service organization, you’re always focused on customer satisfaction and success, so you’re going to organize in teams that are focused on customers.”
Sitaram added that product-development groups are organized in terms of different functions, from product management to engineering and manufacturing to services. And finance is focused on delivering on a certain result, whether it’s a monthly, quarterly or yearly close, or a budget exercise. All of these involve teams coming together to make decisions, he said,…