This article is more than 1 year old

Cisco promises Lync link for its UC kit and collaborationware

Borg will try to assimilate Microsoft's unified comms

Cisco has spent the last couple of years talking up its unified communications and collaboration portfolios, often suggesting it is at the top of the market.

If that assertion is correct it would be quite a coup, given that other players have a long head start.

Cisco's been here before with IP telephony, a field in which it came from nowhere to lead the market. But in IP telephony it worked, mostly, with standards. Its UC products have been a little more isolated from the rest of the world.

What, then, to make of this short and sweet blog post accusing other collaboration vendors of not “adapting to open standards” and announcing that “Cisco has decided to expand our industry leading interoperability to include two way content sharing with Microsoft Lync 2013.”

Cisco is pitching this as something it will do because “customers that have already made significant investments in proprietary technologies are asking Cisco to help them bring these worlds together.”

That could translate as “lots of our customers have already got some Lync and want interoperability because they're not going to throw it out in a hurry”.

Either way, Cisco says “a software upgrade to existing solution [sic]” will do the trick, but isn't yet saying when that upgrade will land.

One last thought: with Microsoft linking Lync to Skype, Cisco might be about to build a bridge from Redmond's free VoIP to its own customers? If so, that will certainly set the cat among the pigeons. ®

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