Cisco buys CloudCherry, moves higher into cloud

However, the press release, blog posts, and marketing material all point to driving WebEx CC -- but what about UCCx customers?

Throughout its history Cisco has always been a maker of boxes. It produces network routers and devices of all sizes. It has never been a UX-focused software company - just ask any Cisco-certified engineer. Any respectable Cisco guru will dazzle you with CLI (that's "Command Line Interface" to us commoners) instructions typed at the speed of light and let out a sigh whenever the HTTP interface (that's "web interface" to us commoners) has to be used.

That's why it was a big deal when the company purchased WebEx in 2007, Tropo in 2015, and AppDynamics in 2017. It knew it had to get into the software business as well as the cloud business. Picking up CloudCherry, a portfolio firm of Cisco Investments, makes perfect sense.

A blog post by Vasili Triant, VP and GM of Customer Care at Cisco, sums up the capabilities of CloudCherry:

CloudCherry is a Customer Experience Management (CEM) company that provides rich APIs, predictive analytics, and customer journey mapping with integrated sentiment analysis.

Buzzwords, acronyms, yada yada yada. What the Cisco customer cares about is this:

With CloudCherry, we’re augmenting our contact center portfolio with advanced analytics, rich customer journey mapping and sophisticated survey capabilities that all our customers can use – whether they’re using Webex Contact Center in the cloud, or our hosted and on-premises solutions.  

That looks pretty good, covering all bases: cloud, hosted, on-premises. But isn't it glaringly obvious that WebEx CC is the poster child? Why aren't there links to the "hosted" and "on-premises" solutions?

Even Mr. Triant's LinkedIn post is guilty of this (note the only product hashtag #webexcc). This doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feeling that CloudCherry capabilities will integrate with anything other than WebEx CC in Cisco's contact center portfolio. Remember IPIVR? UCCE? UCCX? Finesse? For grins I dug deep into cisco.com looking for technical documentation of these Cisco contact center products. Most of them date back to the early 2000s! Have you seen the user interface of UCCX Script Editor or ever used it, the tool to program call flows? It's almost 2020 and Cisco hasn't thought of Visio style drag-and-drop to design a call flow...

Cisco claims to be a leader in contact center implementations and agent seats. It's probably true and a lot of them are the traditional UCCE and UCCX platforms. The CloudCherry acquisition is exciting for sure, but noting how UCCx products have seemingly been neglected, one has to wonder if the roadmap does include for CloudCherry capabilities to be available to on-premise UCCx products as well; and if so, how well will they work together. Cisco is moving higher into the cloud contact center, but with still so many customers on its on-premise CC solutions - will they be left behind?