Forget the switches and routers that built Cisco Systems into a giant, albeit somewhat boring, company at the core of the Internet.
These days, the company is peddling e-mail software, video conferencing systems, cable TV boxes — even furniture — as it tries to break out of the data center and get its products in front of ordinary office workers.
“Cisco is kind of like the Madonna of networking,” said Mark Sue, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “It is continuously trying to reinvent itself.”
The effort directly challenges a main area of growth for some of Cisco’s big customers, including IBM, Oracle and, most pointedly, Microsoft.
The line of business aims to provide a unified set of communication tools that workers can use to make calls, send e-mail messages, hold Web conferences and send instant messages.
Cisco is updating much of its technology behind the effort, including improvements to its TelePresence videoconferencing software and its WebEx collaboration suite.
Cisco’s strategy is an obvious outgrowth of its acquisition strategy. Over the past four years, the firm, which is based in San Jose, bought 36 companies, including WebEx, a Web meeting specialist, for $3.2 billion.
In recent weeks, Cisco has also picked up PostPath, a maker of e-mail software, and Jabber, a leader in corporate instant messaging.
Although Cisco has not yet formally bundled all of these services together into a single suite, the company said it intended to move in that direction.
Microsoft, the maker of Windows and Office software, is not amused. That company dominates the market for the communications software used by office workers and takes in more than $1 billion in annual revenue from its SharePoint collaboration software, which Microsoft executives consider one of their shining stars.
Zig Serafin, general manager of Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, said Cisco’s core business was “under siege,” a situation that…