Despite the market leadership of its consumer division Linksys, Cisco has found it hard to deliver on its promises of bringing an integrated wireless internet/media solution to the home sector, despite investments in software and set-top boxes. Its latest step to repeat its huge success in enterprise and ISP markets, among consumers, will come at this week’s CES show, with the launch of a hosted social networking platform based on its Eos (Entertainment Operating System).
This is designed to enable media and content companies to create and manage online communities via all kinds of devices from TVs to PCs to cellphones, harnessing the growing use of social networking to promote their brands and drive usage of their services. Eos promises a simple interface for content providers to build and personalize web sites, and technology to allow them to support interactive web services, so that fans can connect with musicians, television shows and games. It also promises to reduce piracy.
This is the first major fruit of Cisco’s Media Solutions business unit, created two years ago to push Cisco’s cause in the digital media content sector. Eos actually saw the light of day at last year’s CES, but is now turning into a full product with a specific application in hosted social networking, which Cisco sees as the most important way for marketers and media owners to reach mobile and fixed consumers. Last February, the giant acquired a start-up called Five Across, which made social networking software and whose technology is now incorporated in Eos. Another acquired start-up, Utah Street Networks, has also been important in creating the new system, contributing its Tribe.net social product. The first partner for Eos is Warner Music.
It will initially use the software to create web sites for two artists, Laura Izibor and Sean Paul. Michael Nash, executive VP of digital strategy at Warner Music, said the firm has been trying to create music-based communities for years, but has found it too difficult and expensive to create the technology itself or integrate spot products. “We have tried just about everything out there,” he said in an interview.
Cisco’s aim will be to deliver a whole series of applications and hosted services on Eos, in order to drive usage of Cisco technologies and increase its control of the home media market. So Eos is a far broader platform than just social networking, as its launch a year ago showed. It is a general portal that will host content services geared to many high growth models.
‘It’s going to be the first play that bundles together three things that media companies need to make personalization work ‘ the ability to create a web community with blogs and other messaging capabilities; content distribution; and an enrolment engine which can look at usage and make recommendations on the content to be delivered to each subscriber,’ said Daniel Scheinman, general manager of Cisco’s media solutions group, at last year’s CES.
Cisco claims its experience in distributing video will put it in a strong position in this field, although skeptics are concerned that it will lack the expertise to deal with a new world of customers and partners in Hollywood and television sectors, far removed from its traditional corporate IT base; and that it has little experience, beyond its WebEx offering, of managed services. But Cisco has been aware – since it announced, four years ago, a line of emerging businesses where it aimed to generate growth and billion dollar revenues – that it has to expand beyond the enterprise networking market that remains its largest business. One of its key expansion areas has been consumer media, with the formation of a media solutions group designed to complement the home media-oriented acquisitions of set-top box company Scientific-Atlanta, Wi-Fi giant Linksys and a host of start-ups.
The important point is that the ‘network as platform’ vision has been expanded beyond traditional enterprise networks to mobile, public and even home systems, all of which need to present the user with a unified experience as the boundaries between work and leisure, and fixed and mobile blur.
Also at CES, Cisco will unveil a wireless home audio system, designed to be used in several rooms at once and linked to an online media service, potentially taking it up against vendors like Apple and Sony ‘ though many speculate that what Cisco is really after is to license underlying web-based media networking technology to third parties, rather than taking on the CE giants directly. Otherwise it will be on a steep learning curve in terms of branding and marketing in a hotly contested consumer sector, despite the success of Linksys.
“I would say it’s an innovative, peripheral move for Cisco,” said Signal Hill analyst Erik Suppiger in an interview with the Reuters news agency. “I think to the extent that there is an opportunity for them to leverage content on the internet to networking consumer devices, there’s a decent opportunity to do that. But once you start getting away from the benefits of the internet, it’s less clear how Cisco can compete.”