Cisco Charts New Paths with Eos Media Platform
It's well-known that Cisco has been branching out from its core business of selling routers and switches, but in an open-plan office overlooking San Francisco's up-and-coming Mission Bay district, the networking monolith is venturing into areas that are ambitious even for one of technology's most aggressive acquisition machines.
This kind of information can make it easier for media companies to sell advertising, because it can tell advertisers more about the audience, according to Cisco. This is a large part of the business model for Eos. Cisco will get a licensing fee for the hosted software but also collect a portion of the revenue generated by the content, Brown said. The formula will differ among customers.
Cisco announced one customer at its CES launch, Warner Music, which is still the company's only publicly named account. On Wednesday, it showed off the same two Eos-hosted sites it highlighted at CES, for reggae artist Sean Paul and singer Laura Izibor. The company expects to disclose more customers in the near future, Brown said. The success of Eos will depend largely on a critical mass of media companies using it, because a larger number of Eos-based sites means a bigger set of consumer data.
But Cisco won't do much to open the site up to the global market until late next year. Today, the administrator's interface for Eos is only in English, and site content can only be in Roman-character languages. In late 2010, the company plans to add more interface languages and make it possible to use other character sets on Eos-based pages.
Cisco may be well-positioned to deliver this type of platform, said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank.
"The production and delivery of online video is a perfect cloud system because it is so elastic," Frank said. Fans flock to media sites when new movies or albums are released, and it would cost media companies a lot of money to build enough capacity ahead of time to handle those bursts of activity, he said. Large media companies may be attracted to Cisco for this kind of service because of the company's size and its focus on both video and cloud computing, he said.
The measure of success for Eos will be the revenue that flows to media companies that use Eos, Cisco says. But the company wants to do more than just offer a better way to deliver content.
"What we're trying to do here ... is to do something ambitious," Scheinman said. Just as Turner Broadcasting System went beyond existing forms of media to launch 24-hour cable news with CNN in 1980, Cisco wants to find and support a new media format that's suited to the Internet, Scheinman said.
