Kashyap Kompella has a short but really good article on the Lessons Learned from Cisco Pulling the Plug on Quad. I’ve followed Cisco’s Quad / Webex Social for a while and even had the chance to see a demo while working at a client. I was impressed by their vision of integration portal, social, and messaging. I like what they did to bring it all together. However, they were never compelling enough to create a long term product. Kashyap has a couple lessons learned:
Choose a vendor where portal or social is a meaty product. Let’s face it, Microsoft, IBM, Liferay, Oracle and others have a legacy and consider the portal a key part of their business. Cisco never quite reached that.- Consider alignment between the product and a company’s DNA. Enough said.
I think I need to apply Kashyap’s lessons to other vendors with other products as well.
It’s worth reading.
