Cisco: Email Must Change

Internet giant Cisco Systems Inc. published survey results showing businesspeople’s dissatisfaction with email’s limitations as a work tool.

San Jose-based Cisco seeks to promote its own fancy email tools and other technology to help people work together, particularly advanced videoconferencing, which it calls “telepresence.”

This poll of about 1,000 people in the United States, done for Cisco by Harris Research, showed email is still the “preferred method of collaboration” at work. Nevertheless, 40 percent of people said they got too much irrelevant email and 32 percent complained of time delays, even short ones, that make email less immediate than instant messaging or meetings.

A quarter of respondents complained that they don’t have enough storage for all their email.

The poll found that businesspeople are using several other types of technology to work better together: so-called virtual “shared spaces”; the telephone and conference calls; web- and videoconferencing; instant messaging and social networks.

One problem -- from a business point of view -- with employees using social networks like Facebook Inc., MySpace or Twitter to work together is that half of them bypass their own company’s IT restrictions to do so. That makes keeping corporate data safe more difficult.

Cisco is flogging a number of products to solve these problems, including hosted email and its high-end telepresence products, which it has also promoted as an ecologically friendly way to have meetings, eliminating the pollution caused by cars and jet aircraft as executives collect together in person.

Bank of America recently agreed to buy 200 of Cisco’s teleconference systems, and Cisco is also aiming them at the medical market.