11/17/2009 -- Earlier this month, Cisco Systems Inc. announced a slew of new products aimed at the red-hot communications and collaboration segment.

All told, Cisco trumpeted more than 60 new (or enhanced) applications or services. But the upshot, experts say, is inescapable: The networking giant now fields one of the most creditable collaboration stacks on the market. That being said, it still needs to plug a crack or two.

New entries include a hosted mail service (with Outlook MAPI and Windows Mobile ActiveSync support), a YouTube-like social video service ("Show and Share"), a full-fledged enterprise collaboration platform that supports team spaces and shared communities, and a new technology (Cisco Pulse) that extracts context-specific tags from network traffic.

Gartner analysts David Smith, Jeffrey Mann and Ken Dulaney say Cisco's new collaborative coup has been a long time in the making.

"The acquisitions of WebEx, Postpath and Jabber signaled Cisco's intent to become a major collaboration player, but a dearth of available products undermined this ambition. Cisco's latest announcements show great promise. They fill in many gaps in Cisco's short- and long-term plans. They include many upgrades of existing products, which don't introduce dramatic new capabilities," they said. "WebEx Mail, WebEx Connect (based on Postpath technology and Jabber's instant messaging and presence products, respectively), Show and Share, ECP and Pulse are new and position Cisco as a new contender in the collaboration and social software markets, where Microsoft and IBM remain the dominant infrastructure players. We believe Cisco will have the strongest impact with its video initiatives, which go far beyond simply putting cameras on PCs."

What's more, the Gartner trio adds, Cisco's push amounts to "a competitive move" against longtime partner/competitor Microsoft in the collaboration space.

Cisco's collaboration stack isn't a complete slam dunk, however.

For one thing, it's a relative late-comer in a market that's all but dominated by IBM and Microsoft. Secondly, the Gartner trio notes, in spite of Cisco's enviable bona-fides in the enterprise networking segment, it has a dearth of credibility in the software space as either a hardware or software supplier.

Elsewhere, Cisco must still plug some long-standing holes in its overall architectural view, get both enterprise customers and channel resellers up to speed (and onboard) with its new collaborative portfolio, and train/equip its integrator partners to build Cisco-based collaboration environments. That's quite a to-do list.

Gartner remains surprisingly sanguine about Cisco's collaborative push, however.

"We believe that Cisco is serious about becoming a major player in this market," they observe. "[It] brings considerable resources, market position and organizational discipline to bear."

What's more, the three say, Cisco "has described how it intends to address enterprises' collaboration and social software requirements. Now it must execute on this vision, fill in the gaps and engage its competitors in the market." --Stephen Swoyer