SaaS Journal

Cisco's behaving a little like the Lord High Executioner in the Mikado. It's got a little list and apparently figures nobody on it will be missed if it sent them to an early grave starting with Microsoft Exchange.

See, as of Monday Cisco is in the hosted e-mail business up against Microsoft Exchange Online, Google Gmail, IBM iNotes, heck, even Zoho Mail, but especially Microsoft, because it claims it can save users the price of Exchange Server and still leave them with the same experience.

Cisco calls its Linux-based widgetry WebEx Mail and describes it as corporate-grade technology with native Outlook interoperability - figure contacts, calendars and such - that it got from its acquisition of PostPath last year.

When it bought PostPath, it threatened to take on Exchange and now it's happening. It says it's 70%-80% cheaper than Microsoft.

WebEx Mail is supposed to offer browser-independent AJAX Web 2.0 access to messages and optimized mobile device support.

Cisco says it'll scale past the size limitations of the traditional mailbox and free IT departments from the burden of e-mail infrastructure management and operation since it's in the cloud. And nobody has to abandon the security blanket of their Outlook desktop client.

WebEx Mail uses the same protocol as Outlook so the interface is the same and includes Cisco's own IronPort anti-spam, anti-virus protection.

Cisco aims to charge $3.50 a user a month for the fault tolerant, highly available service including 5GB of storage. For five bucks a head it'll kick in support for Outlook and ActiveSync. Another buck'll buy Blackberry support. And the mailbox can be expanded to a more compliance-sensitive 35GB though what that'll cost is still a mystery.

Cisco's starting the rollout in the U.S. with Europe scheduled for next year.

In a highly intuitive move last week Microsoft cut the price of Exchange Online from 10 bucks a head a month to five bucks and took the price of its Business Productivity Online Suite - consisting of SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Communications Online and Live Meeting - down from 15 bucks a head to 10 bucks a head a month.

Cisco hopes to catch Microsoft users in the transition between earth and the cloud although the stuff costs the same.

It's also come up with YouTube-like video widgetry and a Facebook-like social networking service among the 60-odd products it announced Monday.

It's all part of the big bear hug Cisco's thrown around video-heavy collaboration.

The YouTube-like stuff is called Cisco Show and Share and lets users create, edit and share user-generated video content behind the corporate firewall complete with comments, ratings, tagging, RSS feeds and speech-to-text transcripts.

The Facebook-style portal is called the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform and can be used by companies internally for blogging, wikis, team pages and Jabber-based instant messaging.

It should go up against Google Apps, Google Wave and IBM Lotus Connections for starters and eventually be connected with WebEx Mail as part of Cisco's great Unified Communications push.

Users of the Collaboration Platform are supposed to be able to create team spaces and community environments on-the-fly and there's a customizable framework for integrating legacy business applications and Web 2.0 content. Again it's concentrated on real-time voice and video communication.

Cisco expects independent developers to write applications for the platform complements of the XMPP standard and is handing around an API.

Then there's an Intercompany Media Engine, which connects to any IP network and offers immediate B2B communication and collaboration over a secure network via voice, video, presence, IM and web conferencing. Cisco's so pleased with it it's submitted it to the Internet Engineering Task Force for standardization

And there's a Cisco-hosted Telepresence Directory of endpoints, organizations and people that features a virtual assistant to schedule meetings between the thousand rooms and 75 customers on Cisco TelePresence exchanges with one-click access to WebEx.

Cisco's also dreamed up what it calls medianets, described as intelligent networks optimized for rich media that are supposed to deliver collaboration across heterogeneous devices, applications and clients.

And it's got media processing engines offering speech-to-text transcription and real-time video transcoding so any content can be shared across the network to any end-point device, including HD interoperability for Cisco TelePresence.

To "evolve" these medianets, Cisco's got three appliances that work with its Integrated Services Routers Generation 2, including the Cisco Media Experience Engine 3500 and 5600, which are supposed to provide the real-time video transcoding that lets any content be shared across the network to any end-point device, including Cisco Unified IP Phones.

Ah, and then there's a search platform called Pulse that's supposed to dynamically tag content as it crosses the network, so people can locate and connect with the best available experts and information they need. This should have the privacy police up in arms since it word-counts to find out who's supposedly an expert.

Cisco means to offer all these products as on-premise, on-demand or software-as-a-service solutions in the cloud, or blended approaches, and says they can be deployed on a sliding scale of consumption based on business process needs rather than IT constraints.

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