WWT Collaboration Director Talks Collaboration Rivals
Recently, CRN published an article discussing collaboration rivals, Cisco and Microsoft, and WWT's Collaboration Director Joe Berger commented on the partners and the benefits they bring to customers.
On October 18th, 2016 CRN posted:
For the second quarter of 2016, Microsoft closed the gap with Cisco, with the networking leader owning 14 percent share and Microsoft right behind at 13 percent, according to Synergy. Cisco captured $1.3 billion in revenues for the second quarter, representing a decrease of 1.3 percent year over year. Microsoft's $1.22 billion in UC sales for the quarter was an increase of 1 percent compared to a year ago.
Joe Berger, collaboration practice manager for World Wide Technology, a $7 billion-plus solution provider who partners with Cisco and Microsoft ranked No. 12 on the 2016 CRN Solution Provider 500 list, said the majority of his conversations with customers revolve around whether to buy Cisco or Microsoft, or both.
Berger said both companies have their selling points, such as Microsoft bundles, but only Cisco can offer an entire portfolio in-house.
"If you look at the entire portfolio from Cisco, nobody can really beat them right now just because they've got the hardware, software, they're doing the integrations -- they're building out the APIs and SDKs to do a lot of the integration pieces," said Berger. "The challenge with Microsoft, is Microsoft [needs] an ecosystem of partners to achieve this."
Although Microsoft has the software and Surface Hub piece, it needs to rely on other vendor's products for solutions such as Polycom for video.
"It's a lot of management around different OEMs and services, where Cisco is sort of all in one," said Berger. "But what makes Microsoft very compelling is they bundle in Office, Skype, SharePoint and everything in Office 365. So you get a lot at that price point."