Cisco Launches Full Suite of Email and Social Tools for Enterprise

Cisco is well known in some circles for its networking hardware and services, but, lately, it has been acquiring a string of companies in diverse fields showing that it is ready to move into different markets and that it's bound to become one of the big tech giants. Now, it's encroaching further into foreign territory with a broad set of collaboration tools for enterprises, going head to head with the likes of Microsoft and IMB and newcomer Google.

Cisco is now launching 61 new or updated products with a focus on collaboration with products like the WebEx Mail email service, social-networking tools and a video-collaboration tool going against established ones like Microsoft Exchange and IMB's Lotus series.

WebEx Mail is an interesting product, as it tries to be a jack of all trades of corporate emails. It's web-based, like Google's own Gmail or IBM's new iNotes, with a dedicated online interface, but it can be easily accessed within Microsoft Outlook for those used to the desktop client. The web interface is based on Yahoo's Zimbra corporate mail service.

Cisco is also getting into the enterprise social-networking sector with several new products like Show and Share, a tool to create, edit and share videos between employees and customers. Cisco also launched the Enterprise Collaboration Platform, which is a full-blown suite of social tools like blogs, wikis, instant messaging, courtesy of Jabber, a company Cisco acquired a year ago, and others.

"Collaboration is the foundation of our One HSBC strategy. We design, build, and deploy the products, systems and processes to serve our global customers by leveraging the skill and insight of colleagues in dozens of countries," Ken Harvey, chief information officer, HSBC, said. "Collaboration technology and management process is about creating an environment rich enough to allow the human fabric of teamwork to develop."