Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx brings good and bad news. Good news: the Office 2.0 industry welcomes a formidable new player that has the potential of fundamentally altering the rules of the game. Bad news: WebEx Connect, arguably one of the most ambitious projects announced last year, might be at risk of being neglected. It’s too early to tell what the true impact of such an acquisition will be on the industry at large, but here is why it matters.

Until this acquisition, Cisco was one of the last major IT players without any Office 2.0 play, beside some initiatives related to Voice over IP. With WebEx now on board, Cisco gets the most popular web conferencing solution, as well as WebEx WebOffice, one of the best web desktops, used by over 325,000 paying customers.

The flip side of the story is that Cisco might not have as strong an interest for WebEx’s more exotic endeavors, especially WebEx Connect, which we covered in this past article. WebEx Connect is an extremely complex platform, which is attempting to blend BPM 2.0 and Office 2.0 concepts into a Software as a Service offering that has huge potential, but requires an hour or two in front of a white board to fully understand.

By acquiring WebEx, Cisco becomes a Software as a Service player, and its a major departure from selling boxes. Nevertheless, web conferencing services are becoming a commodity that has been sold for years by telecommunication service providers, which account for a large portion of Cisco’s customer base. WebEx Connect is very different though. It embeds complex middleware technologies that are not owned by WebEx, but were developed by Cordys, whose founder — Jan Baan — was an early investor in WebEx. Cordys being such a critical piece in the Connect puzzle, I doubt that Cisco will significantly invest in its development, unless it acquires Cordys itself.

Most likely, Cisco will focus its new WebEx division on much simpler offerings, such as WebEx Meeting Center and WebEx WebOffice. But if it does not, Connect has the potential of becoming a formidable BPM 2.0 platform that very few players could rival with. At Intalio, some of our customers are starting to take us down this path, asking for the embedding of a portal (Liferay), a content management system (Alfresco), a messaging system (Zimbra), and a full Office 2.0 suite (ThinkFree). Currently, we sell our technology as packaged software deployed on premise, but we are seriously considering the development of a SaaS offering as well. If we do, this would put us right on the path of Cisco Connect, which would make for some good competition.