Cisco Web Meetings and Collaboration Solutions
Sometime during last year Cisco bought WebEx and it just looked to me like a simple case of merger due to Cisco’s floating cash… But recently someone shared about the real business sense…. Cisco practically owns the entire network infrastructure on which Internet is built… if there is a single network resource that can compete on that scale, it would be the telephone lines… but again they aren’t owned by a single entity.. WebEx, on the other hand, is a market leader in the area of online sharing systems (web meetings, remote support etc)…
So what does Cisco have in mind for WebEx??? The guess is this, that WebEx in future would be able to host significant Softwares as Services .. So if you want to open a Office document on a machine, which does not have Office suite installed on it, you could go to WebEx and get their Document service for some hours and edit your file… just stretch this concept a bit and you can find possibilities of a new marketing model, and almost every software to be hosted as a service… imagine your iTunes library being hosted as a service, so you could access it from anywhere… mind blowing… so if WebEx in future would hold the SaaS front, Cisco can proudly own both the Data and the Network..
The idea of hosted software can be seen as an implementation at http://docs.google.com… its isnt in best shape yet … i got to see some error messages in there… but it works! So someday Google too could host almost everything you’d need… sounds nice but would take some time before it becomes a fully developed application hosting environment…
Also for Google its been just “Online Search” until now, thats paid them well… Gmail still isnt as popular as Yahoo! or Msn, which gives them a good reason to pursue and partly own Yahoo! thats precisely what Microsoft is trying hard to stop… Unfortunately MS isn’t really loved or trusted by Yahoo! and I doubt if it would ever let MS take it over (might well just happen)…
so if all goes well, we would have to buy fewer software in future… and this would be a brilliant way to fight piracy (whatever that means in todays world 
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