Debra Chrapaty, Senior VP and GM of Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group, has said that Cisco has decided to shut down the hosted email service, Cisco Mail.

“The positive disruption represented by the cloud computing transition was what led us to introduce a Cisco hosted email product in November 2009,” said Chrapaty.

“Customers told us they were interested in divesting responsibility for managing email on-premise in much the same way as they outsourced conferencing to Cisco via our SaaS WebEx Conferencing service.”

The service had been going for thirteen months and was considered a controlled release.

“The product has been well received, but we’ve since learned that customers have come to view their email as a mature and commoditised tool versus a long-term differentiated element of their collaboration strategy. We’ve also heard that customers are eager to embrace emerging collaboration tools such as social software and video,” continued Chrapaty’s blog post on the move.

“That was the key factor in the decision, which we shared with customers today, to discontinue investment in Cisco Mail.”

Cisco will assist its trial customers with their transition to other email alternatives and support them for the length of their contract.

The company will also continue to integrate to other email systems to protect customers legacy communications investments.

The post concluded, “It should go without saying that Cisco remains very committed to the collaboration technology market opportunity overall. We will continue to listen to our customers and we will take appropriate risks to ensure that our collaboration architecture continues to position Cisco to lead in this $38 billion market.”