There's a new kid on the corporate email block

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Cisco are most famous for their networking offerings, but they've been about much more than that for a long time now. With WebEx, they took more that their fair share of the corporate screen-sharing, web conference and IM. They have VoIP, they have video conferencing. In short, they have networking, in all its forms.

One of the few things they're missing is mail, right? Wrong. Cisco WebEx also provides mail services, but SaaS-based (in the cloud), rather than traditional, hosted services. They serve the mail service from the cloud, and support customers who choose to use Outlook as their mail client.

What next? Well, they replace the client-based Outlook experience with a fully online client offering, called Ciso Inbox, which will allow a user to do all the things they'd normally do in Outlook, but without ever having to leave the comfort of their browser.

This is starting to sound like gmail, right? Well, not really, because Cisco Inbox users can sort mails by "Topics", where they can classify mails by topic. This is not at all like gmail labels. No, honestly.

Still not convinced? Well, here's another way it's different to everything that's gone before, especially gmail:

You can link your inbox to social networking sites. One site, anyway: LinkedIn. That's right, the shit one that nobody in their right mind would ever be interested in.

What? It's like Buzz?! What do you mean? It's nothing like Buzz! You can't link Buzz to your social networking sites, now can you?

OK. So you can link Buzz to your social networking sites, but you can't post to them from Buzz, only the other way 'round.

Woohoo! Cisco Inbox scores.

Wait, no it doesn't. gmail can post status updates to Facebook.

So now I'm sure you can see all the reasons why Cisco Inbox is going to rule the world of corporate mail. Watch out IBM. Watch out Microsoft. Watch out Googl... Actually, google, you're safe.

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