Cisco Systems has announced several enhancements to its collaboration portfolio. Key takeaways include:
Source: Cisco Unified Communications Scorecard at SoftwareReviews. Accessed November 11, 2019
Cisco’s enhancement to their collaboration portfolio reinforces the growth that the organization has seen for their collaboration suite over the past year. However, despite these gains, the organization as a whole continues to be struck by slower enterprise spending and the ongoing US-China trade dispute.
Indeed, in the same week as Cisco’s collaboration announcement, Piper Jaffray downgraded Cisco from overweight to neutral. In other words, Cisco’s stock return is projected to be in line with the industry average, rather than return a higher amount. After all, Cisco’s shares fell nearly 16% in August, reversing its broader 2019 uptrend.
Cisco consumers will certainly be rejoicing at the partnership with Microsoft. However, it will be interesting to see whether the eventual power dynamics of this relationship will be Microsoft taking advantage of a weakening Cisco organization, bringing Webex users into the Office 365 ecosystem