Cisco Aims To Be Collaboration Switzerland

(MoneyWatch)  Cisco knows it can't dominate the Web the way it did data centers for decades, but is articulating a vision that respects the heterogeneous aspect of the medium while satisfying the typically outsized ambitions of its leader, CEO John Chambers.

I learned during a long phone coversation with Laurent Philonenko, vice president of the company's unified communications business unit, that Cisco wants to duplicate the success of its data center routers online to become a sort of neutral ground on which customers can rely when working with a variety of applications, both through software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on-premise. "If you look at our multi-protocol router--what it did for the data center, our ambition is do the same for collaboration technologies," Philonenko said.

You can find threads of this same fabric in comments made by Padmasree Warrior, the company's CTO, during the recent conference call with financial analysts.

Our cloud strategy is to link from an infrastructure perspective what we are doing in the data center all the way to the application delivery through SaaS.

Philonenko told me that Cisco also aims to provide the security protocols to enable customers to collaborate more effectively not only internally, but with partners and suppliers as well. It's the fabled "glass pipeline," but with built-in corks to keep out the eavesdroppers. "Customers want to maximize their assets... and we want to be the hub where we make all this work together -- voice, video, and data," he said.

Warrior articulate much the same vision, only in broader terms:

The key differentiation that we are focused on with respect to the network enablement is in providing security, which is a key concern of most enterprises in the today architecture with cloud as well as enabling higher levels of service agreements and providing the interoperability between different cloud architecture.

Chambers said during the call that the company's strategy for the next decade "is very similar to what we do in the early 90s. And as we said before, it powered our growth for decades." The difference between the 90s and today, however, is as stark as the difference between the clean, well-lit data centers Cisco virtually owned, and the messy, virtual data centers of the cloud, where Cisco will have to share customers with the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon.com. It remains to be seen whether it can rise above petty rivalries to the level of its lofty rhetoric.

[Image source: matti via Flickr]