Cisco Challenges Microsoft in Collaboration Technology

Cisco Systems on Wednesday announced an update to its suite of products used for business communications, intensifying its battle with Microsoft in that growing market.

Joe Burton, chief technical officer for unified communications, said Cisco is improving the products' interoperability, integrating TelePresence -- a virtual meeting experience -- with its customer service software, and adding instant messaging and other new features to its online conferencing known as WebEx.

Cisco, the supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet, is the first to offer unified communications as a real software service, market analysts said.

Unified communications refers to the technology that is needed to deliver voice, video and data on land-line and mobile networks.

Unified communications makes up only a fraction of Cisco's annual revenue of 40 billion dollars. It is counted as part of the "advanced technology" segment, which makes up 25 percent of total sales.

But Cisco believes unified communications represents a 34- billion-dollar market and is one of the keys to the company's continued growth.

"We think we have absolutely the strongest position of anybody out there," Burton said.

Cisco has been bulking up its communications products, buying WebEx for 3.2 billion dollars in March 2007, PostPath, a provider of e-mail and calendar software, in August for 215 million dollars and Jabber, which offers instant-messaging software for corporations, earlier this month.

WebEx, the leader in Web conferencing, competes directly with Microsoft's Live Meeting.