On the same day Microsoft released Exchange Server 2010, networking giant Cisco Systems announced Monday a new version of its own e-mail and collaboration platform.
Among the 61 updates – 61! – is Cisco WebEx Mail, marking the company’s entry into the online hosted e-mail market. The enterprise-targeted product is slated to compete with Microsoft Exchange, Google Apps and IBM’s Lotus iNotes.
The deal-breaker, though, is that unlike Google Apps and iNotes, WebEx Mail is interoperable with Microsoft Outlook – the most ubiquitous e-mail platform. That means companies can more easily migrate their back-end e-mail systems from Outlook to Cisco’s platform, and choose to keep Outlook on the front end.
WebEx Mail integrates some of the technology Cisco acquired when it purchased PostPath in 2008, the San Jose, Calif.-based company said. The product is part of Cisco’s new Unified Collaborations System 8.0, which also adds more support for business-to-business instant messaging, videoconferencing and security.
“Traditional (e-mail) solutions have changed little in the past 20 years,” Alex Hadden Boyd, a marketing director at Cisco, wrote in a blog post. “Google has come in from the consumer side and caused some disruption, causing businesses to think about the cloud and to think about some of the existing limitations on capacity in the legacy e-mail offerings. But larger enterprises are reluctant to make major changes in the user experience.”
That’s starting to change. More businesses are warming up to cloud-hosted e-mail solutions – including the Los Angeles city government, which decided last month to replace its aging Novell system with an enterprise-grade Google Apps platform.
Microsoft made another big push for the enterprise market on Monday with its release of Exchange 2010. The Redmond-based company added features such as instant messaging, text messaging, and audio and voice-to-text voicemail delivery. Click here for that coverage.
But clearly there’s a market – the tech giants have offerings. And as the economy starts turning around and companies start to refresh their hardware and software, it will be interesting to gauge the interest in cloud-computing options.
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