Deepening its reach into the middle to low end of the videoconferencing market, Cisco's (CSCO) acquisition of Tandberg, announced today, is either a milestone that will widen acceptance and adoption of the technology, or a blow to interoperability that will limit its ultimate spread. Needless to say, which of those views you hold depends largely on whether you’re a Cisco competitor or not.
The Tandberg deal “gives Cisco the technical chops necessary to back up its longstanding marketing claims regarding interoperability (end-points to service providers) and breadth of coverage (board room to desktop),” remarked Bradley Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration and conferencing at research firm Current Analysis.
Cisco made a splash with its introduction of its elaborate, room-sized TelePresence systems three years ago, and has boasted that such high-definition, life-sized conferencing technology enables new forms of communication and collaboration with customers, colleagues, and partners. Besides being costly, though, the first generation of Cisco TelePresence was almost entirely proprietary. Cisco has been at pains to deliver, and tout, systems that can interoperate with other vendors’ models (and include less pricey options), but competitors and some enterprises still complained that conference sessions linking Cisco TelePresence rooms to, say, Tandberg or Polycom (PLCM) systems were lower quality and complex to set up. While Norwegian vendor Tandberg has taken a more neutral stance, neither it nor Cisco have participated in recent interoperability events, points out Stefan Karapetkov, emerging technologies director at Polycom.
“Cisco is less interested in standards, and considers proprietary extensions as a way to gain competitive advantage,” complained Karapetkov. “The concern of the video communication industry right now should be that the combined company will be so heavily dominated by Cisco that standards will become last priority, far after integrating Tandberg products with Cisco Call Manager and WebEx.”