Cisco brings Quad to 5,000 Virgin seats

Cisco's unified communications and collaboration technology is to appear at 5,000 seats at Virgin Media, on a pay-as-you-go deal.

The agreement will see the Quad platform, a rival to Microsoft's SharePoint and Salesforce.com software amongst others, installed in various departments at the major UK ISP.

WebEx and other unified communications software will be taken up by Virgin employees too, following a trial of 1,000 seats.

Virgin will be paying on a per-user per-month basis and running the software from Cisco UCS servers in its data centre alongside other boxes, Keith Griffin, technical leader in engineering at Cisco, told IT Pro.

We are looking at extending the deployment models for Quad.

"Right now Quad is being delivered via a private cloud, so it is deployed within the Virgin Media data centre," Griffin said.

He revealed Cisco was looking at a cloudier way of providing Quad to customers.

"We are looking a multiple different models, including the WebEx model. We haven't announced anything in that area yet, but we are looking at extending the deployment models for Quad," Griffin added.

"For now our main focus is inside the enterprise and that's really been driven by large enterprise customers wishing to stay within that model. But we are also seeing requirements for deployments coming straight from the cloud as well and we will react to that I would think."

Griffin said one of the main drivers for Virgin was the ability to use Quad on different devices, on the web and via native apps.

Prior to the Cisco implementation, Virgin had limited collaboration technologies on board and was largely relying solely on phone and email, according to Griffin.

"The culture that Virgin Media wanted to achieve was to really drive the concept of social collaboration, so allowing people to interact more in a more ad hoc way and also have more visibility to see what other people are doing," he added.