Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud Raining Down Benefits for Businesses

April 27, 2009

Cisco Systems is beefing up its WebEx collaboration services.

The networking colossus recently announced a series of enhancements to its Cisco WebEx suite of offerings, which allow customers to outsource their collaboration needs and access them on demand as network- or cloud-based services, also known as software as a service (SaaS).

Announced last week, the enhancements included new releases of the four core Cisco WebEx software as a service (SaaS) meeting applications, and the launch of the Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud – a purpose-built network designed to deliver high-quality collaboration services within and between companies.

Cisco also announced the Cisco WebEx Node for the ASR 1000 Series edge router, which delivers performance and other benefits to customers by allowing the router to act as a "point of presence" within the corporate network for meeting attendees on that network. Finally, Cisco also introduced cloud-based "security as a service," designed to help businesses collaborate more securely as their employees become increasingly mobile and interactive.

To find out more about the enhancements and how they can help companies securely navigate an increasingly collaborative business environment in which the distinction between what's "on premise" and what's "in the cloud" is rapidly becoming blurred, News@Cisco spoke with Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software group.

Why and how is collaboration changing? What do companies and individuals need to do these days that they didn't in the past?

Doug Dennerline: For most people, collaboration has been something they have done only within their own function, or if they're progressive, across functions within their company. But today, cross-company collaboration is increasingly important and dynamic. What makes up a work group or a project team varies from day to day and from month to month, so tools need to be flexible and scalable.

We see people building up large teams quickly and then disbanding them as that project is over. And teams change. They sometimes include your customers and other times are your suppliers, consultants and temporary workers. It's very fast moving. Also, the tools we use have become much richer. Traditionally, collaboration or communication across companies was done via e-mail or a telephone call. Today, we've added video as a part of that, as well as social networking.

It's important to remember that collaboration in companies is not just about technology. It's about a culture and a process and technologies that enable people to collaborate differently from how they did in the past. It's the adoption and use of technologies that make them valuable to people. If you don't have a culture that drives what the teams and people need to go through to use these tools, you don't get the adoption. And the processes are the things that help drive that.

For Cisco's part, Chief Executive John Chambers uses boards, councils and 26 initiatives to drive the need for collaborative capabilities in the company, because you just can't get it all done if you don't use them. And the tools we bring to the market collectively – Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco WebEx and Cisco TelePresence – are devoted to helping companies communicate beyond their own boundaries and across companies as well as internally, synchronously. That's a pretty significant change.

What do these changes require from information technology?

Doug Dennerline: The challenge that chief information officers (CIOs) face today is an empowered end user. Whether CIOs want them to or not, people are going to go out and get tools and bring them into the workforce. What we bring to the marketplace that's unique is the ability for a CIO to allow an empowered end user to do this, but in a way that's as compliant as possible with the security and policies needed to ensure the company assets don't become public assets.

One of the things people often don't realize is that if you have collaboration via SaaS, like we do with Cisco WebEx, the information technology department actually has a great deal of policy control. It can decide things like what types of information can be shared – whether someone can share a desktop in a meeting, or can only share a certain type of application, or whether they can share applications only inside the company or outside the company. That can be done on a user level or a group level or a company level. In other words, there are a lot of policy and security controls built into our side capabilities.

How is Cisco WebEx changing?

Doug Dennerline: The lines between what's considered on premise and what's considered in the cloud are becoming blurred. It's no longer about choosing one or the other, as some vendors require their customers to do. Our approach takes advantage of both cloud-based services and on-premise infrastructure investments, while focusing on delivering the best possible experience for our customers and the best possible return on their investment.

There are some things we don't see leaving the premise for a long time, such as customer information and large company-wide computer software (ERP) systems. Some of those capabilities can continue to be delivered through the on-premise network. But we're marrying that with the things that we can deliver at the pace of innovation of the Web, which is a much shorter application development cycle than for on-premise applications.

At Cisco WebEx, for example, we update our software every four to six months. Compare that with an on-premise update of your ERP software, for instance. Every new customer who gets a subscription to Cisco WebEx will automatically get the latest version we just released, and every existing customer that has a subscription will automatically be upgraded to that new version as well. That's one of the great benefits of SaaS.

What exactly is the Cisco WebEx collaboration cloud and why does it matter?

Doug Dennerline: It's a global private network designed specifically to deliver our collaborative applications with the best possible availability and quality of user experience. It has a couple of primary characteristics that are very important. For starters, it is very secure. It's externally audited to make sure we comply with the SAS 70 Type II public security standards. It's also highly available and it's globally redundant, so if there are problems in one part of the country or globe – for example, if an Internet service provider is doing an upgrade or a cable is cut – we automatically switch over to another way to join that meeting, and the users wouldn't even notice.

This is made possible in part by the intelligence within our collaboration cloud. It has location intelligence, bandwidth intelligence and load balancing. So if a customer is having a WebEx meeting, our application will look for the service providers with the highest bandwidth availability, the lowest latency, the best user experience and the closest physical proximity, and the customer would automatically join that particular meeting. It's all part of the intelligence that no one ever sees, and it's something that other hosted meeting applications don't offer because they don't have a global network. Currently, we host over 200,000 meetings every single day worldwide with attendees from over 150 countries.

What are the business benefits of the Cisco WebEx collaboration cloud?

Doug Dennerline: The big one is the assurance that customers get from using our services. For example, a lot of customers use our Cisco WebEx Event Center application to market what they do via webinars. Our collaboration cloud allows you to do that with the assurance that nothing will interrupt that meeting.

Another benefit is agility. When I talk to information technology buyers and ask them what they like about collaboration through SaaS, they say it's the ability to get up to speed and be productive very quickly. So if they want to have our Cisco WebEx Training Center capability, they can place the order and be up to speed within days – sometimes even within a day. It's not about a six-month investment to get up and running. Similarly, if their team grows, they know they can add participants quickly, and if it shrinks, they can scale down. It gives them the opportunity to be very flexible and dynamic.

Can you illustrate what is meant by security as a service?

Doug Dennerline: Essentially, it's when a company outsources some of its security and gets it as a service from Cisco, perhaps because of timeliness issues or because they have a lack of in-house staff to support it themselves.

As an example, Cisco announced in March that it would offer hosted e-mail security. One model we support is where all of a customer's e-mail is sent to the Cisco security cloud where the e-mail is inspected for viruses and so on, and then sent on to the e-mail servers on the premise. Or you can have a hybrid model where outgoing e-mail is inspected on the premise, but ingoing e-mail is inspected in the cloud.

That was the beginning of our security-as-a-service efforts. Now we're looking at additional capabilities like checking for botnets and malware and dealing with those in the cloud before any traffic actually reaches the premises.

How does the Cisco WebEx Node for ASR 1000 benefit businesses?

Doug Dennerline: With this new product, we're basically taking one of the nodes that sits inside the data center and putting it onto the blade that sits in the ASR 1000 router. It acts as a "point of presence" or interface point for a customer on the Cisco WebEx collaboration cloud.

This achieves a couple of great things. For example, take a company meeting scenario where the chief executive wants to broadcast to thousands of users within the company over the Cisco WebEx Event Center application. Using the traditional method of getting access to a WebEx collaboration cloud, every one of those thousands of users would separately connect to the WebEx Collaboration Cloud.

But with the Cisco WebEx Node for ASR 1000, all of those users can connect to the closest point of presence, which would be an ASR 1000 in their Enterprise Network, inside the firewall. Instead of thousands of individual streams, there would be a single stream from the ASR 1000 to the collaboration cloud, which would result in a huge reduction in the bandwidth required to host that meeting. And if each of those users was experiencing a high-definition video, which we now support in WebEx, that stream would also be shared.

The result would be a much faster, much better experience and – because you're considered part of the cloud – you have all of the protection of the Cisco WebEx collaboration cloud like global load balancing and backup, as well.

What is unique about what Cisco is doing?

Doug Dennerline: As I mentioned earlier, there are hosted offerings out there, but those are different from a global private network designed specifically to deliver collaborative applications. Our competitors are coming from a couple of places. Some of them are delivering services completely from the cloud, but they're using the Internet as the vehicle for that meeting to occur, so your experience is only going to be as good as the slowest point in the Internet.

The other competitors are all premise-based, so they are behind firewalls for the most part. A few are trying to take their premise-based software and put it in the cloud, but we know from our own development of our own cloud-based software that that's a very difficult task. The development cycle on that large code base is very slow. What we're doing is taking the best of both of those worlds.

Cisco has for years been very good at taking things that we've done in software, putting them in silicon and putting them on a blade, and that's exactly what we've done with the Cisco WebEx node. We've taken the Cisco WebEx meeting experience and put it on premise, using the network that customers have built with us locally to give them the best experience. No one else in the industry can do that. It's based upon an expertise in doing just that.

Where do you see collaboration going in the future? What is the vision?

Doug Dennerline: The vision is to extend the capabilities we bring together with Unified Communications on premise, and marry these with assets we deliver from our cloud and with the immersive experience of TelePresence. This will allow users to have the best possible experience when collaborating both internally and across companies, regardless of their location and the device they're using.