Executives Promote Cisco Collaboration

Pledging to put customers first even as they head on a collision course, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco CEO John Chambers held an unusual public discussion in Aug. 2007 to try to clarify how the companies would both compete and cooperate in the area of unified communications.

Cooperating in Engineering

Moderated by talk show host Charlie Rose and broadcast over the Web, the New York meeting was heavy on assurances that both Microsoft and Cisco will work together to make sure their products fully interoperate as they both try to dominate the future of “quad play”-unified infrastructure for data, mobility, video, and voice communications.

The precipitating factor for the discussion was Microsoft’s Communications Server, due in Oct. 2007, which offers Voice over IP (VoIP) and Web conferencing software that overlaps with Cisco solutions. Both companies dominate particular areas of business computing-Microsoft in desktop software and Cisco in network hardware-and many customer systems combine products from both vendors, forcing the two companies to cooperate. With the release of Communications Server, however, the two are competing directly in the potentially huge market for new unified communications. The rivalry had already moved up a notch in spring 2007 when Cisco bought Web conferencing leader WebEx, which competes directly with Microsoft’s Live Meeting conferencing service and the new Live Meeting functionality of Communications Server.