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WebEx: What Cisco gets from acquisition

By John Fontana, Network World, 03/16/07

Cisco on Thursday acquired Web conferencing and collaboration service provider WebEx, which has 2.2 million registered users and a 64% market share. While WebEx is best known for its Web conferencing, the vendor has a platform optimized for delivering software-as-a-service, a slate of online office applications and a services development environment. Gary Griffiths, president of WebEx products and operations, told Network World Senior Editor John Fontana just what WebEx brings to Cisco’s growing software stable.

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What does your WebEx Connect platform bring to the table for Cisco?

For us it is our own version of unified communication or unified collaboration. Instead of taking all these related applications, whether it is sales force automation or a learning management system, instead of doing each one of those one off we said let's build a platform that does it. Let’s provide the APIs and the software development kits and the technology platform.

So we are doing a couple of things. For us, we are opening up the MediaTone network and allowing innovation to come from the outside. We are good at the online collaboration, we go deep there. We say WebEx Connect goes wide, it lets WebEx and our customers take advantage of all the great application ideas that work better with real-time collaboration added.

With Cisco, we see that platform going broad. What I mean is they have an absolutely unparalleled relationship with the enterprise. We believe that the enterprise business is there for the taking. With Cisco, putting this in their kit bag is a huge opportunity. For WebEx, where we have smaller customers, it will be interesting to explore with Connect the benefits of allowing Cisco to add their own technologies to the Connect platform and penetrate into the SMB.

Are there integration challenges you face in combining your platform with Cisco products?

There will undoubtedly be challenges, but frankly we have plenty of time to figure out where the synergies are. I think both sides kind of look at this as an embarrassment of riches in the different ways we can combine technology. And, yes, we are gong to run into some challenges along the way but that is pretty insignificant compared to where we see the opportunities.