At its press event on Tuesday, Cisco Systems Inc discussed its plans of enhancing the functionality of its online conferencing service, WebEx. Cisco's proposed Web-based service would be a competitive alternative for the popular Microsoft Office software, and would, as such, mount pressure on its rival as well as partner, Microsoft.

Talking about the move under consideration on Tuesday, Cisco's Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline said that the proposed service, using technology from Jabber Cisco, would enable business users in creating documents they could draft and share via the WebEx meeting and collaboration service. As such, the extension of the Web-based video conferencing service would also include instant messaging and presence.

The addition of unified communications functionality to the WebEx Connect service would increase its competition with Microsoft in the unified communications arena.

Expressing opinion about it, analyst Zeus Kerravala, with Yankee Group, said: "As Cisco expands this business, the competition between Cisco and Microsoft will only increase. Microsoft is strong on the desktop and Cisco is taking a lot of these software functions into the cloud."

Cisco's 2007-acquired WebEx is currently the dominant Web conferencing service, which Cisco has essentially utilized as the foundation for its up-and-coming big business collaboration tools. Lately, Cisco has acquired two other companies, with the intention of amalgamating them into the existing service.