Cisco Partner Summit: What the Heck Is Unified Workspace?

Partner conferences are known for their massive information-dumping sessions — so much so that inevitably an intrepid blogger such as myself misses an important piece of news. Sometimes the opposite happens — news is announced that, for whatever reason, intrepid bloggers such as myself can’t get any follow-up information on. Aggravating.

Just such an instance occurred today at the Cisco Partner Summit 2012, when Padmasree Warrior, senior vice president and CTO, took to the stage for her keynote session, which essentially was a download of Cisco’s technology portfolio and how they fit together into one architecture to support the future of technology.

During the course of her presentation she brought to the stage Wendy Bahr, senior vice president of Global and Transformational Partnership for Cisco’s Worldwide Partner Organization, who announced Cisco’s Unified Workspace, a strategy that incorporates Cisco’s Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) — an end-to-end systems approach that unifies virtual desktops, voice and video — with a BYOD technology that apparently is being announced April 19, the last day of the conference.

(I have a hunch it is, or a close cousin to, Cisco’s BYOD+ technology — which, according to a March 20, 2012, Cisco Channel Partners blog post, “[Scales] the experience of many users with multiple devices, anytime, anywhere. … delivers a unified security policy across the entire organization … [and] optimizes and manages the experience to meet the needs of many types of users with diverse devices, security and business requirements.”)

OK, great, glad to know about it. Sounds like a nifty technology and one that is sorely needed as more companies allow their employees to work anywhere and on any device. And I’d love to write more about the strategy, but I don’t have anything else to share. Which, as I said already, is aggravating.

Maybe Cisco doesn’t think the technology is baked enough to put out any news releases or schedule any briefings on Unified Workspace. If that’s the case, however, why put the spotlight on it at the Partner Summit? I understand Cisco is doing its best to prove it has the elements in place to enable “The Internet of Everything.” But maybe it should have alluded to Unified Workspace and not list it as the latest in Cisco’s “Unified” technologies.

I’ll keep checking back with Cisco in the hopes someone can have a conversation with me about Unified Workspace and what it means for Cisco’s channel partners. Stay tuned.