Cisco and Google, the dominant providers in networking and Internet search respectively, are expanding their research and development partnership in an attempt to gain a stronger foothold in the overall communications market.
"We've been working with Google to work out how we can integrate Google with voice messaging to create some great applications," Cisco vice president for solutions marketing Rick Moran said yesterday during a keynote speech at Cisco's Australian Networkers conference on the Gold Coast.
Moran didn't offer any specific examples of current projects the two companies might work on together, but did discuss the potential for "mashups" utilising Google's mapping applications. A possibility might be a service that automatically provides search results, including geographic data and contact details, based on the content of existing voice or e-mail messages.
Google and Cisco have worked together on more limited projects in the past. Cisco is one of the partners in Google's OneBox development program, which creates software for Google's enterprise-level search appliances, and has ported its MeetingPlace package to the OneBox system.
Not all their technologies have worked together so agreeably, however. Google's desktop search software can cause problems with Cisco's Unity system administration and communications tools due to DLL conflicts.
Angus Kidman travelled to the Gold Coast as a guest of Cisco.
