If this is the post-PC era, I first encountered computers in the pre-PC era. I remember a field trip to a room of giant kitchen appliances that turned out to be full of information instead of groceries. Despite the lack of snacks, I was enamored with the punch cards they gave us as souvenirs. My dad was amused enough to bring home a whole stack of punch cards from his work — Hewlett-Packard’s Santa Clara manufacturing facility. (Another day he brought home a cat.)

Not long after, I met my first desktop computer when I started learning very basic BASIC programming on a Commodore PET with an external cassette tape drive. Ah, the nostalgia of summer school and CRT displays.

In a recent internet trends presentation to BASE, the Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students, Mary Meeker, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, went through the charts and graphs showing the state of the union in the world of operating systems. In the late-1970s and early-1980s, the operating system world was a colorful place (especially when graphed). Then came Intel-based PCs. Microsoft started to take over, quickly flooding the universe with MS-DOS, then Windows.

Apple managed to maintain a Macintosh beachhead, but it was definitely a sea of PC.

For the most part, it was much like Henry Ford’s infamous “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.” At most companies it was the same story, you can select any of 14 options, but they’re all PCs. Want a Macintosh? Provide business justification and get VP approval. Today at Cisco, the PC vs. Mac choice comes down to personal preference.

In 1998, Oracle introduced “the concept of hosted applications to the Oracle market, allowing customers to rent access to software hosted on Oracle computers and access those systems via a Web browser.” As eager as Larry Ellison might have been to displace the dreaded Microsoft and PCs with lightweight terminals, the rest of the planet wasn’t quite there yet. Hosted software? Internet storage? Thin clients? Web access? Huh, sounds a lot like cloud.

Fast forward and today we’re in the post-PC era.
Android and Apple iOS have made even quicker, more vigorous operating system inroads than DOS did, thanks in large part to devices and applications.

Devices
Smartphones and tablets have outplaced desktop and notebook PCs in global unit shipments since the fourth quarter of 2010, according to Morgan Stanley Research data.

PC manufacturers need to adjust more quickly than most seem to be doing to survive. Says ZDNet’s Jason Perlow, “To put it bluntly, the Post-PC world represents a displacement of computing from the traditional, 30 year-old Intel architecture used on desktop to the Datacenter and the Cloud.” We no longer need the same processing power and storage for the things we do on a daily basis. We have web applications, we have clouds, we have mobile devices.

Today is about mobility, smartphones, tablets, and clouds — ideas impossible to picture on my first field trip to HP. Operating systems, bits, bytes, and cumulus accumulations of data aside, the biggest difference is in how we use our devices of choice today. Emphasis on choice.

“Within ten years, the majority of business professionals will be using extremely inexpensive thin notebooks, tablets and thin clients (sub $500) which will utilize any number of software technologies that run within the browser or will use next-generation Web-based APIs and Web Services … to provide line-of-business application functionality.”--Jason Perlow

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Tags: Android, Apple iOS, cloud, collaboration, mobility, Operating system, Post-PC Era, Windows

As the market leader in Unified Communications, Cisco has a broad customer base, with organizations from the Fortune 500 to small local businesses using our UC portfolio of infrastructure and endpoints. Since we have over 120,000 customers and over 50 Million users across the globe, we wanted to find out more about who these users were and how they use Cisco IP phones on a daily basis. Last week, we launched a Facebook contest asking our Cisco Collaboration fans to submit photos of all the interesting locations where they use their Cisco IP phone, and to tell us how they use them and what benefits they were seeing from their phone.

I’m excited to report that the responses have been fantastic! Cisco users have been enthusiastic with their stories, sharing how Cisco IP Phones complement their workspace, and offer their organization a highly reliable and proven technology that is still very much at the center of facilitating enterprise communication and collaboration. The always-on familiarity of the dial tone, the secure access to directory features and the high quality of the voice and increasingly video interactions are all contributing to these devices being used on a daily basis. Users span all industries and include teleworkers, nurses in a hospital, call center agents and retail store managers, and office workers from different industries, each of whom rely on a high performing, stable solution for their critical communication needs.

What’s your Cisco desk phone story? Become a Cisco Collaboration fan on Facebook and share your story! Read More »

Tags: Cisco, collaboration, communications, contest, ip phone

While I was participating in a web conference from my home office, I started thinking about how much and how fast things have changed in the last decade around communications and how we use collaboration tools in the office, at home and on the road and most importantly the number of devices available to me so I CAN collaborate over distance.

One thing that stays constant in this industry is change, especially when it comes to devices. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and see if you can remember any of these once “have to have” mobile devices. The Nokia 9000, The Motorola “Flip phone” and The “Razor”, Palm Pilot, dare I say the Blackberry and of course at the start of 2007 the IPhone came on to the market — and we all know how that is playing out — this being a rarity. More recently, Samsung is challenging Apple with the Galaxy and DROID OS is becoming more prevalent than IOS. Last I checked, there was an estimated 1.3 million Read More »

Tags: Android, codec, collaboration, h.265, IOS, IP Phones, iphone, mobility, SIP, standards

As my colleague Murali Sitaram shared in his recent blog, our Oct 16 announcement focused on providing customers with choice — more options in how they deploy robust collaboration offerings based on their specific needs and requirements. As customers evaluate the options — private, public and hybrid cloud — and ultimately deploy, many will turn to Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) partners to find valuable options to meet their business needs.

Cisco HCS partners are cloud providers, systems integrators, and resellers who offer a hosted collaboration solution that is certified as Cisco Powered by Cisco. This offering includes our Cisco Collaboration portfolio in a “as-a-service” cloud-based offering.

Our strategy is to Read More »

Tags: as-a-service, Cisco HCS, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, cloud, cloud partner, collaboration

“But didn’t you just release Cisco UC 9.0?”

I have heard this often since Oct 16 when we announced Cisco Unified Communications Release 9.0 “in the cloud”, or more specifically in Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS). The question has led to positive discussions around Cisco’s focus on providing customers their choice of deployment model without compromise.

Cloud collaboration is an integral part of Cisco’s Collaboration strategy. We are committed to delivering feature parity for Cisco Unified Communications on premises and in the cloud. After a new Cisco UC release is made available for on premises deployment, then within Read More »

Tags: Cisco Contact Center, Cisco HCS, Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco TelePresence, Cisco Unified Communications., Cisco WebEx, collaboration