Cisco Pushes Into Social Networking

Cisco is not the only tech giant attempting to bring social networking into the corporate realm. Microsoft's Sharepoint is also widely used for sharing corporate data, and cloud specialist Salesforce.com(CRM) recently said that its Chatter social networking technology, used by about 20,000 small and medium-sized business users, accounts for about a quarter of the company's total customer base.

Sitaram, however, claims that Quad offers more real-time communication than Microsoft Sharepoint, specifically around IM, voice and video.

Around a dozen Cisco customers have already started deploying Quad, and the technology is expected to become fully rolled out within the next 12 months. Quad apps for Apple's(AAPL) iPhone and iPad will be launched this quarter with Google(GOOG) apps coming in the first quarter of 2011 (coinciding with the Cius launch), and Blackberry apps arriving in the subsequent quarter.

Cisco is currently tearing out its own intranet and replacing it with Quad, according to Murali. The networking giant will have around 70,000 employees on the Quad platform by the end of October.

--Written by James Rogers in New York.

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