Tech

Teams and Webex: What if Microsoft and Cisco merge their platforms?


Disclosure: The companies mentioned are clients of the author.

When Cisco announced the big Webex last week, I was very impressed. This week, Microsoft Ignite is underway, and Microsoft is treating the collaboration the same way it has treated .Net. As I write, Cisco was at the event, talking about how the two companies are collaborating on development tools and the significant impact the partnership has on Cisco customers using Azure and App Dynamics.

Microsoft and Cisco are not natural competitors and have previously partnered with Unified Communications. That got me thinking: what if they collaborated in the future of communication? What if they worked together and combined Teams and Webex or shared technology to the extent that both products could be equally enhanced and interact more seamlessly with the other?

Teams vs. Webex

The core differentiators Microsoft is introducing this week with Teams include things like deep app integration across their productivity and development tools, and the use of avatars and holograms. Last week with Webex, Cisco demonstrated its extensive integration with telephony, using employee monitoring while preserving privacy (for administration), and using holograms. (Both products use Hololens.)

So which one should you choose? You would choose Teams if you were associated with Microsoft’s toolkit, and you would use Webex if you wanted to integrate your communication methods (phone + video conferencing) and if you needed to make sure employees Your remote member is not at risk. Your choice is to maximize process productivity or maximize employee efficiency. And your new problem is that “or” doesn’t make sense – I can’t think of a business that wouldn’t want to do both.

You can use Teams specifically for IT and software development (if you develop software) and you will use Webex for staff meetings. Depending on the nature of the collaboration needed, you can use to connect customers, suppliers or partners – Teams for software, Webex for everything else.

Team + Webex

Collaborative tools are a human factor for the companies that create them. Microsoft Teams is likely to have a more significant economic impact as a tool Microsoft uses than a product Microsoft sells because it makes Microsoft more efficient. The same is true for Webex and Cisco, which makes the competition between the platforms a lower priority than the capabilities of both platforms for their respective vendors or users. . Selling these tools is an incremental revenue; Using these tools enhances everything these companies do internally and externally.

Auto companies often cooperate on cars and engines; For example, Toyota and Suburu have collaborated on FR-S and GT86. They shared development costs and created a pair of sports cars that each could sell with a distinct flavor, drastically increasing overall volume and potentially reducing costs due to increased economies of scale. up.

In the case of Microsoft and Cisco, the partnership will create a significant competitive advantage over other existing and emerging products that are inconsistent in features or interoperability. (Hardware, Love this product from Poly, it’s easier to work with both than with a non-affiliated competitive offering.)

Instead of both Teams and Webex going separate and redundant paths, Microsoft and Cisco can develop the same core features for each while optimizing for each customer’s needs. They can divide the work, with Cisco focusing more on increasing network performance and integrating with Cisco tools. In contrast, Microsoft will focus on better integrating Hololens and their tools – and both could enhance the possibility that avatars need to be much more realistic.

Better to be together

Both Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex are market leaders in collaboration with unique features and capabilities. But they all have their own distinct advantages. Teams is more integrated with Microsoft tools and will increase productivity in that suite. Webex is more integrated with existing telephony tools and does a better job at ensuring work/life balance and department/team dynamics (potentially improving loyalty and employee retention.)

I can’t think of a company that wouldn’t want both of these feature sets. Additionally, both Microsoft and Cisco will use their respective tools to improve the performance of each company.

By joining forces, they will create a new threshold for the market, almost no competitor can match. By sharing the effort to improve their respective products, innovation will also accelerate, making the combined effort almost impossible to catch up.

Strange things happened.

Copyright © 2021 IDG Communications, Inc.



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