Today the Cisco Media Solutions Group announced new customers, features and professional services options for the fast growing Cisco Eos social entertainment platform.
Details on the announcement can be found here, but I wanted to take a moment to welcome the Travel Channel, All Access Today and The Eleven Seven Music Group/Tenth Street Entertainment to the Eos platform. We look forward to working with each of them to deploy exciting and profitable social entertainment experiences for brands like the Travel Channel Academy, Willie Nelson, the Gorillaz, Peter Gabriel, Blondie and Nikki Sixx.
Announcing these customers is a great way to wrap up what was a great year for CMSG and the Eos platform. We announced general availability of the platform at CES 2009, and a strategic relationship with Warner Music Group in August. The relationship with Warner has resulted in more than 20 Eos-powered sites being deployed between August and December – about 1 a week. That’s a great proof point to Warner’s estimate that they can deploy sites 5x faster on Eos than other solutions they’ve used. (For more updates on WMG’s experience so far, read this post.
In addition, 2009 saw significant enhancements to both the software and hosting infrastructure for Cisco Eos. There were 12 software upgrades (as a hosted platform, new Eos features are released every 4-6 weeks) that resulted in more than 400 feature additions or enhancements including things like:
- Facebook Connect integration
- Advanced customization tools and
- Pre-integration with various advertising services
(More below)
On the infrastructure side, we increased the capacity and reach of Eos with our conversion to Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS) which resulted in a 10x increase in compute power in ½ the data center space, using 1/3 less power than our previous architecture. (I’m no hardware junkie, but going into the data center and seeing the equipment of the “before” and “after” UCS conversion standing side-by-side was impressive. We’ll try to get pictures for you hardware junkies.)
2010 is already shaping up to be even more exciting. We’re looking forward to highlighting the first sites from our new customers, who are already using some “hot off the presses” Eos functionality to build high-value, truly integrated fan experiences. We’ll continue to be cranking out new platform functionality and already have some more announcements tee’d up for the first half of this year.
Stay tuned, and as always, let us know if you have questions or comments about the Eos platform.
Scott, the sites created via EoS are impressive. If I understand correctly, EoS enables companies to create white label solutions (sites) with special emphasis on social media functionality. That’s great!Is this available as a self-serve offering or as a professional services engagement? Also, how do you differentiate from Ning?
Akash,Great questions; thanks for asking.The Cisco Eos platform is a self-service offering. We do have a professional services team that can help with deployments or with special needs, but it’s not a requirement to use the platform. Today we also announced the Cisco Eos Partner Program which are 3rd party service vendors we can refer media companies to if they want specialized skills in things like web design, development, etc that may not be our core focus.At a high level, there are three key differentiators from others:1) Eos was purpose-built for media companies to be able to CREATE, MANAGE and MONETIZE social experiences built around their branded content. As such, it has more enterprise class features such as content management and audience analytics BUILT IN to make this a platform for developing a sustainable digital business2) Eos functionality is integrated into a unified administrative back-end so you can manage all of your sites, web assets and human teams from a single interface. This helps the media companies achieve the economies of scale across their portfolios of content — something they haven’t been able to achieve by building sites on a one-off basis.3) Finally, with Eos the media companies have a high degree of flexibility for designing the consumer-facing UI. Working with media companies, we knew that brand and the representation of that brand is critical to the experience companies want their fans to have. For that reason, we give media companies direct HTML and CSS access so they can skin each module and page exactly as they want.I could go into a lot of nuances about hosting infrastructure, levels of customer support, etc, but those are some of the big differences.Thanks again for the question.
Thanks. So how does one get access to the platform?
Akash,you can get in touch with Cisco Eos sales here: http://bit.ly/7sjIAeCheers,
Scott, I found your post above very interested and I would enjoy learning more about your partner program and who I might be able to contact about it. Can I ask how you handle high quality video(HD), audio and live streaming on the Eo’s platform. Are you partnered with CDN’s or does the client need to develop that relationship. Thank You Jon Witte
Jonathan, Thanks for the note.You can contact the head of the partner program by sending an email to eos_partner_prgmATcisco.com. More information is on the web at http://www.cisco.com/web/solutions/cmsg/partner.htmlWe have our own CDN relationships, but most customers have their own relationships that they want to hook into. The Eos platform is agnostic in that sense.
I’m trying to find someone to speak to about MS Money. This is truly a great tool and I understand the company plans to stop marketing it. Would you consider selling this product?