Cisco unifies messaging with CRM

Networking giant Cisco last week announced that it has unified its messaging and customer relationship management (CRM) units under one roof, but insisted that this is not a venture into enterprise applications.

Networking giant Cisco last week announced that it has unified its messaging and customer relationship management (CRM) units under one roof, but insisted that this is not a venture into enterprise applications.

Eugene Lee, vice president of marketing for Cisco's newly formed internet communications software group, said: "This is a strategy built around platforms and infrastructure. We are explicitly saying that we are not trying to be an applications vendor."

Cisco said that it plans to rely more on partners for the development and distribution of back-end unified messaging technology, and revealed several partnerships it has recently forged. These include Chordiant Software, Kana Communications, PeopleSoft and Oracle. Major players such as Hewlett-Packard, Sun and Software.com have also joined on the unified messaging development side.

"Cisco is a company moving from serving a $64bn purely data networking market and going after $260bn worth of telecom opportunities," Lee said.

Blair Pleasant, director of communications analysis at consultant Pelorus Group, said that the move to telecoms made sense. "Companies are shifting unified messaging to unified communications by offering real-time management, data handling and collaboration - these are the companies that will thrive."

Pleasant said that platform development for the continued addition of enhanced services was critical to the growth of the unified comms market.

The technology developments will include unified messaging, allowing consolidation of voice, fax and e-mail communications into a single application, accessible from a variety of wireless and networked devices. This unification will be supported by IP communications technology allowing unified messaging systems to be used in a real time environment.

Unified messaging will also be combined with transaction services for e-business systems.