Today, Cisco announced formal arrangements with a number service providers to offer Quad on a hosted or managed services basis. The chosen service providers include ACS (a Xerox company) in North America, Logicalis UK in Western Europe, and Alphawest (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) in Australia.

Its objective is to give companies of all sizes, around the globe, the opportunity to experience Quad for themselves. Unlike a lot of social media, Cisco employees see Quad as a real boon to productivity. If integrated with Cisco Pulse (which I wrote about in this post in November 2009), it can be used to “tag” elements (like audio tracks from teleconferences or the contents of messages) to make them more suitable for sharing.

Based on its own experience, Cisco realizes that the value Quad will differ on a company-by-company basis. It is a service that each company will have to experience in order to recognize its tangible value. That’s why Cisco has engaged CapGemini to act in both a consulting and system integration capacity as part of the roll-out. CG’s roles will span from “defining use cases and business goals for social collaboration to implementing and integrating Quad within the customer’s existing processes and environments, as well as driving governance and adoption to ensure the effective use of the platform.”

This move to cloud-based instantiation of Quad will make it more competitive with Microsoft Lync (which is offered on a hosted basis through Microsoft Office 365 and the Azure cloud) as well as IBM’s collaboration suite offered on a hosted basis as LotusLive. That said, Cisco Pulse stands to be a real differentiator.

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Meanwhile, at the posh Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Cisco held its second Collaboration Summit featuring major updates and extensions of the resources that support both intra- and inter-company collaboration, as well as collaborative customer care. The Twittersphere was also alive with comments from the Defrag Conference in Denver, and tweets surrounding a variety of talks about generation, control and filtering of streams of BIG DATA provided a counterpoint to presentations of enterprise infrastructure, architecture, software and services that encourage collaboration, communications and conferencing.

In Cisco’s case, the day-and-a-half of briefings on architectural pillars, product descriptions, strategy discussions, customer testimonials and demonstrations, provided vivid pictures of usecases for the rapidly maturing line of core technologies – including social platform and IU associated with Quad, the inter-company communications support of IME, the Android-based Cius tablet, and the virtual desktop. Collectively they provide Cisco customers and partners solutions that leverage the core functional elements: Interoperable Open Architecture, Flexible Deployment Models, Enterprise Social Software, Pervasive Video and Secure Intercompany Communications.

I’ll be issuing an advisory next week with more details on the contrasting approaches being taken by Microsoft and Cisco. My top-line thoughts follow:

For customers and technology partners looking for Microsoft to fulfill on its promises surrounding Lync to facilitate PBX replacement, the company does not disappoint. For those looking for a UI (user interface) that supports multimedia messaging and conferencing, Microsoft Lync delivers those goods as well. Indeed, if you are a customer that is steeped in the server-side architecture where Active Directory houses the company directory, Exchange is the core of email and messaging and Office applications are the foundation of productivity, Lync is your glue.

Cisco’s approach puts much more emphasis on the rapid arrival of “pervasive video” as the model for interpersonal and intercompany communications. It will require some retooling of the way that broadband media streams are managed from endpoint-to-endpoint, but Cisco and partners are working on many of the answers there. Another point of major departure revolves around the contact center, where Cisco has a vision that embraces social networks (with Socialminer), Capture and analytics and a new desktop (Finesse) that serves as a “container” for all sorts of agent and supervisor apps and instances. By contrast, Microsoft will depend partners, led by Aspect, InteractiveIntelligence and PrairieFyre to deliver on contact center functionality.

The implications and promises of the two approaches are the core subject of my forthcoming advisory.

Nexidia Capture, by contrast, supports “complete analysis of recorded interactions.” In conjunction with Nexidia’s ESI (Enterprise Speech Intelligence) product suite, companies can conduct the sort of mining and extraction of meaningful business intelligence from multiple audio streams. This could also support a service like Cisco Pulse which can do pattern matching among multiple audio streams to detect commonalities and help build communities.

Nexidia will be demonstrating its integrations at this week’s Cisco Collaboration Partners Summit in Phoenix. I will be there and will be getting some real time demos.

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Four different services, in two different categories are offered. Two services, “Private Cloud” and “Backup services” fall into the “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) category. “Security Services” and “Unified Communications” are considered part of the “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) offering. According to promotional material, this pre-packaging is designed to provide a simple, pay-per-use means to adopt a cloud-based approach to enterprise computing and communications.

Orange Business calls “Flexible 4″ an end-to-end service that offers the services of best-of-breed technology providers in pre-tested configurations. We’ll see how that plays out in the marketplace, where such out-of-the-box or standard solution sets still must be tweaked to interact and interoperate with existing technologies and multi-vendor solutions. Support of “private clouds” is an important development and the Flexible 4 approach will minimize capital spending over time, the question is whether it has the potential to eliminate the need for professional services to integrate with existing technologies.

All told, it just doesn’t feel that flexible.

Because it serves as a virtual desktop, it brings Cisco’s Quad, as well as Show and Share into the mix. Quad is a highly flexible user interface that serves as a repository for all the widgets, gadgets, applets or feeds that can be packed into a personal portal. Cisco Show and Share is positioned as a “social video community” platform which, as the name implies, provides a mechanism for employees to share videos to support the projects that they are working on with a broader team.

Cisco calls Cius an “enterprise tablet”, which differentiates it from the Apple iPad (while taking advantage of many of the technical attributes that are iPad-like). For instance, the ability to access an enterprise’s secure VPN (virtual private network) is baked in at the factory. Many of the features support quick and seamless transitions from the Cius’s “virtual desktop” to an employees physical desktop in support of mobile employees.

From a competitive standpoint, it is a nice, pre-emptive strike by Cisco against not just Apple, but any incursions by makers of Windows boxes, like Dell or Lenovo, but especially HP. Cisco is also making a bold appeal to the Android developer community by inviting them into the Cisco Developer Network (CDN).

CDN may not rival the iTunes AppStore, but building apps that conform to API’s that can be dropped into Quad and displayed on the Cius out in the wild should be a provocative challenge to Web app developers around the world.

Addendum: Cisco told the trade press that the device will be generally available in “early 2011″. It will be equipped with both front-facing and rear-facing cameras. It will connect with peripherals wirelessly through Bluetooth (in addition to WiFi) and physically through USB ports. Finally, the targeted street price is “less than $1,000.

Greg Sterling has an interesting angle on the competitive impact Cius may have on Rim’s plans to introduce a tablet here.

In other words, Web developers can build communications-enabled apps “without knowing anything about communications.” Genius!

As characterized by Hussain, ACE is the product of marketing “pull” that crosses several functional areas in an enterprise. Demand starts at the functional level, where platform incompatibilities may have thwarted a departmental head’s efforts to reap the benefits promised by providers of “unified communications.” ACE comes to the rescue with shrink-wrapped “connectors” for Cisco, Avaya (including the vestiges of the Nortel CMS line), Tandberg (video endpoints), IBM SameTime, and Microsoft OCS. Thus Avaya makes it possible to overcome incompatibilities with a single DVD that runs on a couple of servers and carries a list price of $10,000-$12,000 for the core license plus per user fees of $50-$100.

As for common use cases, Hussain provided profiles of implementations at a number of global businesses. For example a multi-branch global bank provided a form of “follow-me” connectivity by providing “hot desks” for itinerant executives. The service integrates a voice network that includes IP-PBXs from both Avaya and Cisco with presence management and call origination based on IBM Sametime. In other instances, the ACE SDK was used to “communications enable” business processes and workflows with APIs to CRM and knowledge management systems to support better medical care or customer care in financial services.

Architecturally, ACE resides “on top of” Aura, Avaya’s branded middleware SIP-based communications. Hussain explained that Avaya’s product offering has changed so that ACE will emerge as the application development environment for Aura as well as multivendor environments, and that the “lower layer toolkit (back into Aura Session Manager) will be ACE.”

Hussain, who is a veteran of the “Nortel side of Avaya”, was especially pleased that ACE is now a part of Avaya’s DevConnect program, referring to Avaya’s community of 3rd party developers, acknowledging that this sort of program was “missing at Nortel.”

Avaya is on the right track with ACE. It is putting tools into the hands of the people that are driving enterprise-wide innovation and making sure that key elements of Avaya’s existing fabric for call-handling, voice processing and multi-media interactions remains entrenched in multi-vendor solutions. The short list of supported vendors – IBM, Microsoft, Cisco/Tandberg – is not as “open” as might be ideal, but it does represent a high percentage of Avaya’s current market space.

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But achieving video’s manifest destiny only accounts for a fraction of the growth that Cisco expect two see in demand for the broadband internet. In a WebEx-based conference Cisco execs Tom Barnett and Arielle Sumits also addressed themes they had woven into a companion study called piece “Hyperconnectivity and the Approaching Zettabyte Era.” The concept of hyperconnectivity is constructed on three tenets. One is that people will be multitasking on multiple devices in multiple modes. Second is that there will be several passive applications (they use a “Nanny Cam” as a prototype) which will use bandwidth as a matter of course, without directly taking up a person’s time in the real world. Those two factors, in effect, expand the number of hours in a digital day.

A third bandwidth-hogging factor is growth in popularity of HD video. The preference for clearer pictures on screens of all sizes accelerates the need for more bandwidth. HD has also become the preferred presentation format for internet-based distribution of video that can originate from Flip cameras (a Cisco product), “shared” across peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent, retrieved from indexed services like YouTube, accessed in real-time from the likes of JustinTV or distributed in “locked down” or managed fashion by rights holders (like ABC Family), programing services (Netflix) or the TV Networks (ABC Family, Hulu).

It is no surprise that Cisco is pursuing a highly bandwidth intensive future. The explosive growth in video across networks, devices, applications and modalities creates high levels of expectation for its largest switches and routers to be embedded in both public and private networks. What’s fascinating is that the rate of growth for video pales in comparison with wireless data services, which Cisco expects to more than double in every year during the forecast period (a compounded annual growth rate of 108 percent) so that the the 3.6 exabytes used monthly by mobile subscribers is 39 times the levels seen this year (all this growth in spite of the fact that Cisco’s planners had foreseen the sort of bandwidth cap or metering that AT&T recently proposed to replace its “all-you-can-eat” mobile data plans.

Netflix was something of a poster child for the growth of the Visual Network. By creating IP-based channels for video delivery to cable boxes, game devices, PCs and even iPads, Netflix has shown the way to support subscriber-driven migration from physical delivery (through those red envelopes in the mail) to on-demand across a multiplicity of platforms. It’s a coup for the customers that is supported by the advent of more capacious IP-based networks, cheaper storage “in-the-cloud” and faster processors on all sorts of devices, including mobile. It invokes several of the principles underlying Recombinant Communications (RC) because it transforms existing hardware (TVs, PCs, Games) into controllers and displays for video entertainment.

And for those who try to keep score at home, a zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes.