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    Cisco Partners with IBM to Spur Collaboration Integration

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    In a move that bodes well for the continued proliferation of open computing across the cloud, Cisco and IBM revealed this week they have a formed a wide-ranging collaboration applications alliance.

    Under the terms of the agreement, the Cisco Spark and WebEx collaborative workspace platforms will be integrated with IBM’s leading cloud collaboration solutions, including Verse and Connections. In addition, Cisco pledged to infuse its applications with cognitive computing capabilities enabled by the IBM Watson platform.

    Ross Daniels, senior director of collaboration products for Cisco, says that while there is some overlap between the Cisco and IBM platforms, the collaboration portfolios they provide are more complementary than competitive with one another. Cisco envisions that developers in particular will take advantage of well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) to create workflow applications that invoke the capabilities of both Cisco and IBM platforms.

    The collaboration alliance is the second such Cisco/IBM agreement involving APIs. Last month, the two companies pledged to integrate their respective technologies and frameworks for integrating Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

    As enterprise IT in the age of the cloud continues to advance, it’s clear that before an IT organization evaluates the merit of the actual application, it should first spend time on making sure the APIs surrounding that application are robust and secure enough to satisfy almost any imaginable use case.

    Mike Vizard
    Mike Vizard
    Michael Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist, with nearly 30 years of experience writing and editing about enterprise IT issues. He is a contributor to publications including Programmableweb, IT Business Edge, CIOinsight and UBM Tech. He formerly was editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise, where he launched the company’s custom content division, and has also served as editor in chief for CRN and InfoWorld. He also has held editorial positions at PC Week, Computerworld and Digital Review.

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