At the Cisco Live EMEAR 2013 event in London this week, Cisco brought a new down-to-earth dynamism to the table. The vision how Cisco is intending to empower its clients in an evermore connected world is becoming clearer. In this blog, Forrester analysts Dan Bieler and Peter O’Neill discuss their take-home messages from the event:

      Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) is empowering its high-end channel partners.

Dan. HCS, Cisco’s hosted collaboration suite, allows carriers to offer cloud-based as-a-service solutions, comprising unified communications, telepresence, and contact center, as well as a range of communication features under the Jabber brand. In EMEAR, BT, Telefonica, and Vodafone are already selling HCS, primarily aiming it at their multinational corporation (MNC) customers. They've hinted at scaling down HCS in the future but it remains to be seen whether HCS is the right solution for smaller carriers and SMBs.

Peter. They also need to think about being more attentive to the needs of midmarket system integrators and MSPs. That means they must provide different price configurations that are attractive to SMBs. Positioning themselves only to the national telcos is quite restrictive and doesn’t match the increasing demand we are seeing for these solution across the market. But of course, if they want to compete in the SMB segment, they’ll compete with Google and Microsoft and their pricing strategies. The best way to run two pricing strategies is to use two brands.