Cisco's Quad taps into iPad for business collaboration
Cisco has unveiled its enterprise collaboration software platform, Quad, which will let workers use their iPhones and iPads as well as social-networking features to share information and locate colleagues across their business.
Quad was announced on Friday alongside three other products: Cisco Prosumer Video, a video capture and video management product; FocalPoint, an online video workspace; and WebEx Connect 6.5, an update to Cisco's existing collaboration software.
The products are part of a blurring of consumer and business devices and mark the recognition by Cisco of the increasing requests by workers to use social-networking tools.
"The enterprise collaboration platform offers real-time social software capabilities for the enterprise," said Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager for the enterprise collaboration platform business unit at Cisco, in a podcast for the launch of Quad. "It's built on a bedrock of policy and security, and it's enabled through a unified communications fabric.
"If you really apply policy and security, that's what takes social software into the enterprise world," Sitaram added.
Quad — which is targeted at larger businesses — is scheduled for release on 1 November as native iPhone and iPad applications, Cisco said. Its key features include allowing users to write profiles for themselves to make it easier for their colleagues to identify their skills. The platform also permits the creation of communities with specific areas of interest, and it makes the content from these communities searchable and subscribable.
Because Quad works with Cisco's Unified Communications Manager call manager, it allows the setup of communication to a colleague by voice, video, IM or WebEx with one click.
"Cisco has been great at connecting computers. Over the last 10 years, we've built a range of capabilities around connecting people. Once we connect those people, the enterprise collaboration platform allows them to collaborate," said Sitaram.
Presence integration means workers can see if another worker is available without having to first try to contact them. In addition, the users can set rules on how they want to be contacted.
When it is released, Quad will integrate with content management systems, including Microsoft SharePoint, EMC Documentum, Salesforce.com and Oracle. It will also work with Cisco's unified communications products, WebEx, presence technologies and Show and Share, which is Cisco's social video system. The collaboration platform supports OpenSocial, the Google project that defines a common API for social applications, meaning that businesses could integrate some of their other business systems with Quad.
Quad is based on Vblocks, the computing, network and storage infrastructure offered produced by a partnership between VMware, Cisco and EMC. An IT department can opt to receive alerts from Quad through email, simple network management protocol (SNMP), Java Management Extensions (JMX) or web services.
The Prosumer Video bundle, which is scheduled for release in August, is based on a new version of Cisco's Flip MinoPro camcorder. The camcorder comes preloaded with FlipShare software for local editing and management of video. The finished video can be uploaded to the cloud-based FocalPoint workspace, with security provided using secure socket layer (SSL) and encryption.
The update to WebEx Connect 6.5 now lets people send instant messages and see their contacts via a browser, cutting out the need to download a client to their desktop to use the software.