Back in May 2010, Cisco unveiled a number of software elements designed to be the foundation for both its employee and customer collaboration strategies. Among those elements Cisco Quad (which is just about to be updated into version 2.5) has evolved to become a crucial part of the fabric that Cisco employees rely on to discover the status of other employees (collaborators), establish instant communications and share calendars, interests, media, meeting notes and other “knowledge” that supports collaboration.

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.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud Computing, Cisco, Collaboration, hosted services