Last Tuesday, Cisco upgraded and rebranded their ESN from Quad to WebEx Social. Good idea to leverage their wildly successful UC platform WebEx name to add social. According to IDC, Cisco had roughly a .3% share in the social software space but those who are on that platform are very emphatic and champions to further the cause. Also, in July they will be releasing an on-premise version of this which may attract companies that still haven’t swallowed the cloud cool aid yet.
Cisco is realizing that there is a bigger market out there than just Web Conferencing and those “collaboration” commercials you have been seeing are coming to a bear fruit. You will see mid-market clamor to this product as they can get a multi feature UC platform for a fraction of actually acquiring it. This is collaboration on a different level and I think it will be interesting to see where this new “social” will take Cisco.
