Cisco Systems is now offering its Quad enterprise collaboration platform as a hosted or managed service and is bringing in some partners to help with the effort.
At the Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston June 20, Cisco officials rolled out a number of announcements around its year-old Quad offering, including the upcoming release of Quad 2.5 which will include tight integration with a host of content management and instant messaging platforms from the likes of IBM, EMC and Microsoft, and a mobile application for their Cius enterprise tablet.
At the heart of the news is the new deployment models for Quad, and the partnerships Cisco will leverage to make them happen. Moving Quad to hosted and managed service models makes sense, but Cisco can t do it alone, Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager of the company s Collaboration Software Group, said during a press and analyst briefing via TelePresence and WebEx before the announcement.
"We needed the skills of others to get this out," Sitaram said.
ACS, the services arm of Xerox, will be the first company to offer the Quad hosted and managed service in the United States and Canada, with Logicalis being the partner in the Europe and Alphawest in Australia. In addition, Cisco is partnering with consulting firm Capgemini to work with customers in their deployment of Quad, including defining use cases and goals for social collaboration, implementing the technology in their environments and ensuring the technology is getting the best use.
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Cisco Makes Quad Social Software a Hosted Service
