Why Cisco Killed Umi Home Telepresence and Videoconferencing

Cisco Systems has killed its Umi home telepresence business. The move follows months of speculation about Umi, an expensive high-definition alternative to Skype and other free video conferencing and video chat services. Umi has been on its death bed since at least mid-2011. But Umi wasn’t declared officially dead until now.

Concerns about Umi started way back in 2010, when The VAR Guy’s team noticed that Umi seemed too expensive for consumers. The VAR Guy wondered if Umi would be repositioned for small business customers. By mid-2011, Cisco began scaling back its consumer business, killing the Flip video camera and cutting staff in order to refocus on its core enterprise and SMB lineups. And in August 2011, a top Cisco Videoscape executive exited the company.

Fast forward to the present. In response to more blogger speculation, Cisco finally confirmed Umi’s death today.

The VAR Guy believes Cisco has done a lot of things right in recent months. The company has refocused around core products and listened closely to channel partners while developing cloud platforms like Cisco OnPlus Service.

Though they are now dead, Flip and Umi are important reminders about how Cisco lost its focused. With Umi, Cisco went after the consumer market without really understanding the consumerization of IT. Cisco tried to sell expensive Umi hardware and a monthly Umi subscription fee to consumers while millions of home users had already adopted Skype for free.

And with Flip, Cisco delivered a great product but didn’t offer a predictable upgrade cycle for innovations. A new iPhone and iPad seemly comes along every 12 months or so. Flip’s delivery schedule? The VAR Guy doesn’t recall. And that’s why it died.

Goodbye Flip, Goodbye Umi. Long live Cisco in business.