Cisco sure seems to think so. My answer is maybe. Last week, Cisco announced their new product Cius, which is scheduled to be released in late March of 2011. Some product details were leaked by an insider early this year in speculation that Cisco was working on a 7″ tablet with real-time communication capabilities on the Android platform. Turns out they were right. The product announcement at the Cisco Live event in Las Vegas last week has definitely had mixed feedback. A lot of people are seeing this as direct competition with the iPad but as we’ve seen with Webex, Show and Share and Cisco’s Enterprise Social Software, Quad, Cisco is continuing to develop for the iPhone and iPad in parallel so there’s no reason to think why this would end.

I don’t believe there is any way that Cisco can compete at the consumer level in the tablet market. To me, that’s the point. The 7″, 1.14 lb. tablet built for real-time collaboration and corporate communication to keep mobile users in the loop and connected no matter the specific application is fully interoperable with telepresence tools, offers HD video streaming, multi-party conferencing, email, messaging, browsing and the ability to produce, edit and share content stored either locally or on the cloud. It features a front-mounted 720p HD camera. It’s WiFi-enabled, comes with an accelerometer, has a detachable battery and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. Somewhere I read that it also cooks you dinner, does it’s own dishes and for a monthly service will iron your work shirts and even hang them up for you. Ok ok, it doesn’t quite do all of that. Any of it really, but if those stats were on a Major League player’s baseball card, they’d be hitting .400 lifetime with Hall of Fame RBI numbers.

I really see this device being targeted at existing enterprise customers already using their major Unified Communications products. It’s called an upsell and it’s a genius strategy. Customers are already buying IP Telephony products, video sharing and streaming products, real-time collaboration communcation solutions. To think that organizations would buy a device for whole divisions and groups of users that would seamlessly link all of these solutions that are already in place in their organizations with virtually nothing for IT to do except tell users how to turn them on isn’t crazy, it’s a no-brainer.

The key to Cisco’s success here is to stick to the story. Stick to targeting enterprise, director level or higher management and power users. Stay with the message that this is not an attempt to directly compete with the iPad and that development for all major platforms which their customers might adopt will continue and I think this product will be highly successful. Cisco has promised a whole hell of a lot. Now all they have to do is deliver on those promises. No pressure.