Official farewell to the Cisco Cius

September 27th 2012

Official farewell to the Cisco Cius

After annoucing it a few months ago, Cisco have today officially “killed” the Cius tablet, acknowledging that they haven’t been able to scratch, never mind dent the iPad’s prevelence in the business marketplace. It was always going to be an uphill task for Cisco to displace the iPad even in loyal Cisco enterprise customers, however a combination of an extremely high price point, late delivery, buggy software and the fact that it’s “not Apple” have resulted in today’s final death knell.

So millions of dollars have been burnt with little to show for it. Cisco is now focusing on pushing it’s Jabber collaboration apps onto both the iPad and Android platforms.

The offical EoS article is available here:

Not much comfort for the few (and we mean few) enterprises that splashed out on it…

Barry Hesk
Intrinsic Network Solutions

Cisco Cius availability

Cisco System announced their android tablet device – the Cius – getting on for a year ago. Since then, there’s been a lot of anticipation as to when they would start shipping. Particular interest was around the tight integration between the tablet and Cisco Unified Communications Manager which allows it to becoming a voice and video endpoint.

As of 6th April 2011, it looks like the general release is getting closer.

CRN report that the Cius is going to be made available through Cisco Master and Advanced Unified Communications partners first. According to the article, pricing is meant to be targeting sub $700 for volume purchases.

Details on the specification of the Cius are available here

We’ll do some more digging and let you know about concrete dates as soon as we can. We’d love to get our hands on a couple!