Cisco might drop the Cius tablet line

According to recent news from Cisco’s official blog, senior vice president OJ Winge of Cisco’s TelePresence Technology Group announced that they are eying for a substantial take up of its joint software products like Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx over a wide range of operating systems, tablets and Smartphones.

As this instability has been going on in the market, Cisco has decided to withdraw the investment in the Cisco Cius tablet form factor and will no longer carry forward any extension of the current Cius endpoint beyond what is available now. But they might re-think this decision after evaluating the market and continue to offer Cius only in constraining manner and as per the usage of the customers.

The Cius tablet was announced by Cisco way back in July 2010, but did not appear in market till April 2011 and that’s only to few customers.

However, CTO Padmasree Warrior admitted that security concerns may put a halt to BOY devices and devices like Cius will be become more familiar. Cisco has previously failed to apprehend the magnitude of the BYOD phenomenon.

Last year we witnessed the growth of tablets, Smartphones and iPads. This BYO device is easy to manage and secure to store any information. So this has led to acceptance of this device in the market.

Telestra has decided to offer an LTE version of the Cius to run on its 3G network. This was told to iTWire this year but it seems very unlikely to happen now.

Cisco’s decision to stop the Cius tablet production has also cast a doubt upon Avaya’s similar offering the ‘Avaya Flare Experience’ that was announced in September 2010. It first came in the market as an Android tablet for use with Avaya. UC products want to use the ‘Flare Experience’ in software and among a wide range of devices.

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