The VAR Guy

When the Cisco Partner Summit kicked off earlier this week, The VAR Guy expected the networking giant to spend a good portion of the event talking about Unified Communications ISVs. That didn’t quite happen, but Cisco is finally making some statements to engage software developers.

First, let’s review the market landscape: Cisco and Microsoft both want to dominate the unified communications market. To do so, they will need independent software vendors (ISVs) that write applications for their respective platforms. The VAR Guy assumed Cisco would address ISVs in a big way at Partner Summit.

Cisco didn’t hit an ISV home run at the event, but the company did announce new application-centric tools for branch offices. The lineup, according to a Cisco release, includes:

• Cisco Application eXtension Platform (AXP), a Linux-based hardware module for application development and hosting to support a tighter integration between networks and applications.
• Yada, yada, yada (a bunch of other stuff that was far too technical for The VAR Guy to digest here).

Cisco’s early AXP application partners include Avocent (branch IT infrastructure management), InterComponentWare (healthcare solution provider), NICE (branch VoIP recording), OSISoft (utilities infrastructure monitoring), Precidia Technologies (IP payment processing), ProSyst (management), Sagem-Interstar (IP fax), Verint (branch VoIP recording), and Workbrain (workforce management), according to the Cisco release.

Powerhouse ISV names? Perhaps not. But on the other hand, they are the early movers in the unified communications ISV space. And that may wind up counting for quite a lot in the years ahead.