Cisco Finally Open to Open Source; Mulls Deeper Microsoft Relationship
The VAR Guy is shocked and impressed. During several meetings with Cisco over the past year, the company made little — if any — mention of open source. But the company is finally waking up to the open source community, or at least the software community.
During a chat with reporters that’s occurring right now in Dublin, Ireland, Cisco VP Edison Peres assured attendees that Cisco wanted to have an open approach to software partnerships, and mentioned the “open source” term without being prompted.
The VAR Guy isn’t suggesting that Cisco is ready to embrace Asterisk, SugarCRM and other open source applications in the unified communications market. Nor is Cisco going to “open source” the company’s IOS network operating system. But clearly the giant has finally opened its eyes to some of the key software partnerships that could empower Cisco solutions providers as they tie unified communications to back-end applications and Web 2.0 software.
He also noted there are 10 areas where Cisco partners with Microsoft, but one key area — unified communications — where Cisco competes with Microsoft. Peres indicated that Cisco will attempt to partner more deeply on joint channel programs with Microsoft, but didn’t speculate about how such programs may develop.
I would draw your attention to Joe Burton’s post on Cisco’s blog about UC. He is CTO of our UC group.
He states in part, “In this ever-changing global economy, can any business wait around to get outpaced by competitors while they experiment with PC or email-client-based-architecture for unified communications? Can they afford to exclude future prospective customers, employees, or partners who do not use email as their preferred communications medium? Can they afford the 18-24 month wait for a software-client-based call control architecture that will be marginally mature and deployable?”
Full post here: http://blogs.cisco.com/news/2007/09/analysis_paralysis_on_uc_strat.html
[…] can bet that the software giant and Cisco will find some sort of way to at least acknowledge that they are working to ensure interoperability across their […]
[…] be clear here. Cisco doesn#8217;t plan to open source its IOS operating system. But the company finally mentioned open source and software in the same sentence at this event. The message was clear: Cisco wants to be open to all software relationships, and […]