Cisco has been a long-time major player in unified communications in the workplace. Several years ago Cisco started making noise in the social collaboration marketplace. Cisco had the bright idea to marry their strong telecommunications and conferencing capabilities with enterprise social networking and introduced Cisco Quad. Quad promised to bring web conferencing, instant messaging, telephony, activity streams and more into a single platform that businesses would love.
In 2013 Gartner listed Cisco in the Visionary quadrant of their Social Software in the Workplace Magic Quadrant. I think due the popularity of Cisco WebEx, Cisco rebranded Quad as Cisco WebEx Social along the way.
Unfortunately for Cisco and companies who purchased WebEx Social, Cisco has decided to retire that product and instead will partner with Jive to deliver WebEx meetings and Jabber in Jive’s enterprise social software.
This is a good move for Jive. The larger players in this space – IBM, Microsoft, and Google – already have strong social network systems integrated with their own unified communications systems. Jive now has the ability to market perhaps the best known web conferencing platform as part of it’s social network system. After all, look how people call web conferencing “WebEx” – probably most.
So congratulations Jive and RIP Cisco WebEx Social.
