Cisco's Collaboration Push For Revenue Boost

Cisco Systems Inc. hopes to increase its marketshare in India's collaboration solutions market. The company believes that this market will give it a considerable revenue push in India. (See Cisco Expands Collaboration Portfolio and Sameer Padhye: Global Head, SP Services Business, Cisco Systems.)

Cisco claims to have a 27-percent marketshare (excluding e-mail) in the growing enterprise collaboration market, and says that it is well-ahead of its competitors. According to Cisco, the total market opportunity for the UC collaboration solutions in India presently stands at around US $600 million. That means Cisco is earning a US $162-million revenue from the India's collaboration market alone. It, however, did not share the revenue growth it expects from the collaboration portfolio, adding only that the next big player holds only 12.5 percent marketshare.

"It's a huge market and growing. We expect to increase our market share significantly. We expect video to be the prime driver going forward. To cut the travel cost and other related benefits, organizations look to leverage video from multiple devices. We are committed to extend the reach of unified communications, video and collaboration to benefit everyone in the enterprise," says Dinesh Malkani, Managing Director, Collaboration, Cisco APAC.

According to Cisco, its Jabber solution - a single interface across presence, instant messaging (IM), voice, video, voice messaging, desktop sharing, and conferencing - has already been downloaded by 80,000 users in India. The company is extending its presence and instant messaging (IM) capabilities for the Cisco Jabber clients to customers who have already deployed its Unified Communications Manager, at no additional cost.

The company's push for video is understandable as according to a recent study by Infonetics Research Inc., 80 percent of the surveyed organizations planned to use video as part of their unified communications architecture by the end of this year. The survey, which includes responses from 121 unified communications purchase-decision makers at medium and large enterprises, rated Microsoft as the most-preferred vendor, followed by Cisco, based on the unified communications buyer criteria including service and support, technology, price-to-performance ratio (value), and others.

Cisco competes closely with Avaya Inc., IBM Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Polycom Inc. in the collaboration solutions space. Avaya recently bought Radvision Ltd. to extend its collaboration solution by adding video capabilities for conference rooms and mobile devices. (See Francois Lancon: President - APAC, Avaya.)

- Jatinder Singh, Principal Correspondent, Light Reading India