Cisco Steps Up To Google, Microsoft And IBM
Guido Jouret, CTO of Cisco’s emerging technologies group, explains how Cisco solutions such as Pulse, Show and Share are different from existing offerings from Cisco’s competitors
How Cisco’s Solutions Are Different
Jouret told eWEEK: “If you think about all of the collaboration tools we use inside the enterprise, very few of them make it outside the firewall. At best, we can send e-mail to each other, and that’s about it.”
This “intercompany collaboration” is the theme for Cisco’s Collaboration Summit today. Jouret also defended the Pulse tagging app as original. Most tagging technologies look at corporate e-mail to chart social connections.
Pulse, he said, is a search app that analyzes network data in motion, looking at who is talking to whom to “learn the social graph” associated with corporate networks. Pulse, for example, indexes Web surfing behavior and YouTube videos and tags them based on social relevance.
“We can tag information and assign it social relevance based on the info flowing through the network,” Jouret said. “We don’t have to be in the application either on the server or on the client.”
Fair enough. So how is Show and Share different? Jouret said the app was built with enterprise scale from the start.
Unlike Google video for enterprise and others of its ilk, Show and Share is on-premises, not hosted. It also boasts several security permission levels, from department to workgroup to companywide.
There is also one-click recording from telepresence solutions like Cisco WebEx Connect, Cisco’s Flip consumer digital camera or smartphones. Users can create chapters or upload a transcript, making clips more production-ready.
This makes editing much easier and is a departure from apps such as Adobe Premier. Finally, Show and Share can work with enterprise content distribution networks from Akamai.
This means large businesses can push the video clip into a branch, so that when people press play, they can watch the video without impacting the wide area network because the clip is local.
Pulse and Show and Share sound like unique products, but they also seem as if they were meant to work together: social tagging with enterprise video.
Jouret said Pulse and Show and Share, while not currently interoperable in their first release, will be integrated to work together.
