I’ve had a week to reflect upon Cisco’s mega-launch event around its suite of 61 new or upgraded collaboration-oriented products. During two-and-a-half days of briefings, Cisco executives exposed industry analysts, like myself, to the fact that the concept of “collaboration” embraces much more than “passing the ball” on WebEx or sharing presence information among employees and trading partners. In this post, I speculated that the important announcements would revolve around new Telepresence products and a WebEx branded email offering.

Looking back on the event, I believe that Cisco has introduced two radical new products that have game-changing potential in that they employ “auto-discovery” to broaden the reach of the IP-cloud and deepen its ability to help individuals find others who share interests, activities and responsibilities. Collectively, they improve IP-based networks’ ability to support rapid formation of teams to tackle business tasks quickly and efficiently.

The first product is called the Intercompany Media Exchange (IME). This new feature of the core Unified Communications Manager (UCM) platform provides a mechanism for an ordinary phone call to initiate the process of recruiting and authenticating new members into an IP-based cloud that transcends enterprise boundaries. Once a “phone” (meaning an IP-telephony end-point that can be a physical phone, softphone, videoconferencing device, or other) is authenticated, it will be as if it is part of a shared network for future IP-based chat, phone conversations, video sessions and collaboration.

There are some pre-requisites of course. The IT managers at both firms must install and enable IME on their UCM platforms. But once that is done, initiation of the service is the product of auto-discovery. When that first phone call is complete, a process begins whereby the UCM platforms confirm that the call did, indeed, originate from the phone ascribed to a particular IP address. Ditto for the destination phone. Future calls between the two endpoints are routed through the IP cloud. It eases the migration from the public-switched telephone network (PSTN) to the IP-cloud in a secure way that, if all goes well with the IETF, will become a standard for luring new traffic into the cloud.

Auto-discovery figures prominently in the social fabric created by a new product called Cisco Pulse. It is an idea that was conceived in Cisco Advanced Technology group two years ago. It uses employee generated content – in the form of emails, blog posts and even telepresence sessions – to impute areas of interest and activity. These can be converted into “tags” which are the raw material for the directory embedded in the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP). Tags are created dynamically in near-real-time and they can become an important part of team building by enabling employees to discover others who are working on similar tasks or projects. For media feeds (such as phone-based teleconferences or the audio portion of videoconferences) the system doesn’t capture and transcribe the entire session, but it does use word-spotting techniques to identify recurring topics and phrases that can be translated into tags.

Admittedly, Pulse walks the fine line between surveillance and collaboration. However, in this age of multi-tasking and constant interruptions, many of people (like me) can lose sight of the many projects underway. As for including a complete list of interests or areas of expertise in a public profile, that’s always been the weak link in efforts to build effective social networks inside an enterprise or multi-enterprise team. Pulse is destined to be controversial. There is a Big Brother aspect to the whole process of collecting data and assigning tags to individuals. The next step should be to give end users ultimate control over their public profiles (including machine-generated tags). But, as I mention in this video with Tony Frazier, a Sr. Product Manager for Pulse, the service can be both a memory aid (what am I working on?) and a mechanism for self-discovery.

Cisco deserves credit for adding so many new features and functions to the enterprise IP-backbone. Assembled solutions largely from acquired firms (like adding the WebEx brand to the PostPath email service). It, rightly, moves the industry beyond a pre-occupation with “unified communications” for UC’s sake and has developed a foundation for greater efficiency and resultant cost-savings by disassembling and reassembling network and computing elements. It is the enterprise flavor of Recombinant Telephony.

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Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Cisco, Collaboration