Taking on Cisco?
Posted by tggokul on February 26, 2007
Avaya has become cozy with Google in what I see as a major blow to Cisco. The announcement talks about combining Google Apps with Avaya’s IP telephony. This combo would affect Cisco’s share in the SMB market.
Cisco is getting hit on all sides when it comes to the enterprise market. First Nortel-Microsoft partnership and now this. If the trend continues, the big enterprises would go with Nortel telephony and the smaller ones would go with Avaya’s IPT and Cisco would be left to service nobody. Cisco, I assume, would have to strike up some impacting alliances or would be terribly disadvantaged.
Even at the time of Microsoft-Nortel partnership, I had thought that Cisco would probably team up with Google, but that looks out of question as of now. My hunch is Cisco would go with IBM. That would be kind of ironical. Apple on one side and IBM on the other. But hey, if Apple could get cozy with Microsoft, why not with IBM? What about Adobe? They are doing some neat stuff in IPT stuff and it might not be a bad thing to team up with them as well?
What do you think? Who do you think Cisco will go with?
anonymous said
possible choices
- IBM
- Oracle
- multitude of small to medium sized partners in every geography
tggokul said
Oracle seems interesting.
Gokul
Palani said
I have heard from atleast two sources that Google is hiring high speed hardware engineers at a rapid pace. I suspect if they are getting into mainstream data communications.
tggokul said
Palani,
That is not surprising at all. It has been going around for some time that Google is looking at areas other than just Search and it helps that they have a huge chunk of money waiting to be spent. The recent Google Apps was just one of those ‘new’ areas. Anything web related, you can see them in some form or the other.
Gokul
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