Granted, Cisco hasn’t released too many details about how partners can profit, or even a partner program for this new offering. But it has announced the availability of new hosted email WebEx Mail in the U.S. and Canada.

Hosted email is a well-treaded territory. With companies like Microsoft slashing hosted email prices, and companies like Google with free or near-free offerings, how does Cisco expect to compete? It’s hard enough to get people to switch email services as it is. If Cisco has difficulty selling hosted email, how are VARs expected to sell it to their customers?

All of this points to Cisco’s determined push into collaboration and cloud services. After Cisco bought WebEx, they then had the key to computing in the cloud space, with WebEx’s hosted Web conferencing services. At the Cisco Partner Summit, we saw presentation after presentation highlight Cisco’s dedication to video and collaboration, and that its partners should emphasize these technologies to customers. Hosted email is probably one of the trickiest parts of the collaboration equation, given the multiple vendors already excelling at it. I’m curious to see if this pays off for Cisco, and even more so, if this will eventually pay off for partners.

Check out SearchITChannel.com’s coverage of Cisco expanding its collaboration offerings with hosted email.

The three major architectural plays will be:

1. Collaboration: Cisco will broaden its emphasis on collaboration tools, make video pervasive, and integrate these tools into networks.

2. Virtualization and Data Center: With its unified computing platform and new server products, Cisco deepens its entry to virtualization and data center markets, posing a threat to the vendors who’ve traditionally held greater market share.

3. Borderless Network: Cisco’s core area of routing and switching is evolving into “next-generation routing and switching,” including Cisco WAAS WAN optimization.

In this video, Associate Editor Elaine Hom summarizes the three architectural plays.

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Goodwin announced enhancements to Cisco’s partner program, including a $2 billion increase in credit capacity and that their financing program was being extended from 60 to 90 days. Notably, partners also will no longer need their own network operations centers in order to participate. Cisco will also be providing Flip cameras to all partners attending the conference as part of the company’s growing emphasis of video used for collaboration. Andrew Sage, VP, Small Business Sales, joined Goodwin and demonstrated video’s “immediacy and relevancy” with a sample customer testimonial.

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