Can Cisco (of all companies) fix workplace video?

Conference and Office technologies Cisco phones are notoriously difficult to use. This may seem paradoxical, then, to hear that the company plans to solve the problem by video chat workplace.

The question is: Cisco WebEx, Microsoft's Skype, Google Hangouts and GoToMeeting all exist in their own silos. Imagine owning a Samsung Galaxy phone and not be able to call a friend with an iPhone.

"We need to convert video to, a simple overall capacity, all-any communication much like the phone was," said Robbins Cisco CEOChuck a group of reporters Tuesday atop the company's collaboration San Francisco. "We need to simplify, and we should be agnostic about what is on the other end."

The giant network equipment took his first steps in this direction in August in partnership with Apple to turn iPhones in business phones with consumer appeal. It was a critical matter in Cisco's effort to show the world that its software can run on other devices.

But Cisco can be glue to the wide video conferencing industry? Last month, Cisco announced plans to spend about $ 700 million on a London-based company named Acano little known, which promotes its video service as providing "unmatched interoperability, security, and deployment."

Robbins would not say much about the case, because it is still close. He acknowledged that the cross-platform Acano technology is "one of the key benefits of the acquisition."

Cisco is not alone in dealing with the problem. There is competition from emerging suppliers like Blue Jeans Network and Zoom that tout their ability to bind to the video conferencing tools from multiple vendors.

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For Robbins, transformation cooperation is of central importance for its efforts to keep the Cisco relevant as technology quickly shifts from proprietary systems and towards openness. Less than five months after the beginning of his work as CEO, who followed the 20-year term of John Chambers, Robbins has made it clear that the role of Cisco is not expensive gear down its customers ram's throat.

But on the contrary. The companies are to go to the cloud, discharge more of their hardware to third parties. Cisco has to help them to migrate and leave the provider you want to use, whether servers, storage, security or communications.

It is not unlike the task that Microsoft's Satya Nadella that Steve Ballmer as CEO succeeded early last year, compared with. In Microsoft pushing into the cloud and promoting their Azure infrastructure Nadella has opened the platform and proved willing to help sell technology from rivals such as Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com.