| Cisco has been making a lot of noise lately about expanding beyond its traditional networking equipment base into other products and services. Most notably, it has begun selling servers which puts it in direct competition with traditional partners like IBM and HP. But could Cisco also be looking to become a major player in social networking applications and services?
This week the company announced that it had formed a strategic partnership with Warner Music Group that will see the recording company use a platform developed by Cisco to power the Web sites of many of its artists. The companies say the Cisco Eos Social Entertainment Platform will be operated as a cloud or software-as-a-service platform to deliver “highly customized social entertainment experiences” to the artists’ fans.
I had never heard of the Cisco Eos platform, but the Warner announcement caused me to do a little digging. The development goes back to early 2007 when Cisco acquired a San Francisco company called Five Across, which it described at the time as a leading vendor of platforms to create social networking communities. “With the acquisition of Five Across, Cisco is taking an important step towards helping its customers evolve their website experience into something more relevant and valuable to the end user,” Cisco said when it acquired the firm in February 2007.
Fast forward to January of this year, when Cisco announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas the availability of Eos, a hosted white-label social networking platform geared for the media and entertainment industry. The platform apparently makes it easier and faster for companies like Warner to erect sites for its artists featuring a range of social experiences, including the ability to post blogs, upload video and audio, post user generated content and the ability to create and update profiles.
In this week’s announcement Warner and Cisco said four sites have been launched using the platform for rock banks Paramore and Halestorm, R&B singer Trey Songz, and reggae artist Sean Paul. Warner says it plans to get another dozen sites up using the platform by the end of the year. I checked a few of the sites and while nothing blew me away, all did play up the user generated content features of the site quite well.
It’s an interesting play for Cisco, but I can’t help but think it would do better by remaining focused on its bread and butter product lines.
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