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Cisco Systems Inc. has made at least 16 acquisitions in New England since it began buying companies here in 1994. Seven of those have been pure software companies. The network giant hasn’t acquired an application-layer software company here since 1999, when it acquired GeoTel Communications Corp., a Lowell call center software maker, for $2 billion.
Eleven years later, that acquisition is still bearing fruit. On Friday, in advance of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Cisco announced a collaborative software platform for the enterprise, dubbed Quad. That product includes a contact center software suite designed to let customer service representatives handle customer complaints and requests that surface out on the wide Internet, in places like social media networks and blogs.
About 200 of Cisco’s 2,000 Massachusetts employees are currently focused on software development. Last week, Cisco CEO John Chambers said he’s planning to add to the company’s head count in the state. Cisco has partnerships here with EMC Corp. and the MIT Media Lab, which has helped with social media analytics and behavioral modeling in Cisco’s enterprise software offerings.
Murali Sitaram, Cisco’s vice president/general manager of enterprise collaboration, spoke with Mass High Tech reporter Galen Moore Monday at Enterprise 2.0 about Cisco’s priorities for further developing its enterprise software offerings in the areas of video, social media analytics and the contact center.
Sitaram, on video:
Our goal here is to make video as easy to consume as text is today. One area is real-time video. Through immersive technologies like telepresence, we think we can avoid travel in many cases. We can reduce the cost of communication. We’ve just acquired a company called Tandberg that gives us a full range of different endpoints for video that all can be connected and interoperate together.
There’s the other part of video, which is essentially using that as a content creation mechanism. So, rather than writing a document, I could create a video about how to maybe use a particular technology. Or in the insurance industry, if there’s an accident or incident of some form, I can use video to use that as a statement of record. Many of our high-end clients in the financial services use video for high net-worth connections. All of those you record video and you make that available through a YouTube-like interface.
Sitaram, on social media search and analytics:
We are looking for ways in which we can add a metric, given the amount of social media noise that’s taking place, positive or negative, about what the brand sentiment is. Then, working internally to use that metric to drive different behavior, that’s something we’re thinking through. It all is enabled by these platforms that essentially bring social networking into the enterprise. If they have more information to more effectively do their job, and say they had an expert they had to locate – not just within the call center, but within the broader enterprise – that would help them solve a customer’s problem.
Sitaram, in the contact center:
Increasingly what’s happening externally is a brand is managed in the social media streams, more than it is in advertising and so on. One negative Youtube video, or one negative discussion forum, has a very deep impact on the organization. What we are thinking of is technologies that allow us to take a birds-eye view of all the social media that are taking place against the brands that you represent in your company, scraping that information and making it available proactively to call center agents on the same platform. They use that external information to proactively reach out to the customers.
What’s really interesting from our perspective is the fact that Cisco Quad allows us to create teams internally that may be able to do more systemic solutions for more long-term problems. We think that’s a combination that may be very interesting for us. You want to make sure that the teams formed internally have this interaction between the front end and the back end. We don’t have this all today, but the view is we want to help companies manage brands through their call center.
Cisco's New England acquisitions (software cos. in bold)
| Company | Location | Year Acquired | Value | Business |
| Starent Networks Corp. | Tewksbury | 2009 | $2.9B | wireless infrastructure software & hardware |
| Meetinghouse Data Communications Inc. | Portsmouth, N.H. | 2006 | $43.7M | network security software |
| SyPixx Networks Inc. | Waterbury, Conn. | 2006 | $51M | video surveillance software and hardware |
| Okena Inc. | Waltham | 2003 | $154M | network security software |
| Hammerhead Networks | Billerica | 2002 | $173M | network router software |
| ArrowPoint Communications | Acton | 2000 | $5.7B | Network switches |
| SightPath | Waltham | 2000 | $800M | streaming media equipment |
| Altiga Networks | Franklin | 2000 | $352M | VPN routers |
| WebLine | Burlington | 1999 | $325M | customer service software |
| MaxComm Technologies | Chelmsford | 1999 | $143M | telephony hardware & software |
| GeoTel Communications Corp. | Lowell | 1999 | $2B | Call center software |
| Summa Four | Manchester, N.H. | 1998 | $116M | telephony software |
| American Internet Corp. | Bedford | 1998 | $56M | Internet hosting software |
| Telebit Corp. | Chelmsford | 1996 | $200M | Modem manufacturer |
| Nashoba Networks Inc. | Littleton | 1996 | $100M | Network switches |
| Lightstream Corp. | Billerica | 1994 | $120M | Network switches |
Source: Cisco Systems and MHT research
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