Cisco ruffles feathers with new collaboration tools

From CNET News.com: Cisco Systems is once again stepping on its partners' toes and taking on new rivals as it adds new capabilities to its suite of unified communications products and services.

On Monday, the company will announce several new and enhanced software tools for instant messaging, e-mail, social networking, videoconferencing, document and video sharing. Some of these new products will compete directly with similar products offered by Cisco partners, Microsoft and IBM.

Cisco is taking direct aim at Microsoft with a new corporate e-mail service called Webex Email. Cisco has combined technology from its acquisition of Postpath with its Webex conferencing service. The combined offering gives corporate users access to their Outlook e-mail from any browser. The new service puts email in the "cloud" and eliminates the need for Microsoft Exchange servers.

Cisco already competes with Microsoft in the unified communications market. In fact, the two companies are strong rivals here. But Microsoft has had an advantage over Cisco with its strong presence on the desktop.

Competition between Cisco and Microsoft started to heat up earlier this year, when Cisco took its WebEx Web conferencing service into the cloud. At that time, Cisco executives said there was a possibility that Cisco would compete directly with Microsoft's e-mail Exchange platform.

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