Cisco (News - Alert) Systems, designer and manufacturer of networking equipment, announced Thursday that it has decided to halt investments in its relatively new Cius line of tablet devices. Apparently, the company has acknowledged that the demand for business-class tablet devices isn't high enough to make the Cius profitable, while also acknowledging that taking on the iPad is a foolish move.

"We're not going to bring out additional models of Cius because that would be like swimming upstream. The software represents a much larger opportunity for us," said Marthin DeBeer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Video and Collaboration Group. "We might make it available in a very limited way for specific use cases, but our future business is going into software-based solutions."

DeBeer went on to add that focusing on deploying software like its instant messaging service, Jabber, on other company's tablets is a smarter, and more profitable, move.

OJ Winge, senior vice president of the TelePresence Technology Group at Cisco, reiterated DeBeer's statements in a follow-up blog post: "Moving forward, we intend to double down on software offerings, like Jabber and WebEx, that provide the anytime, anywhere and any-device experiences. We will leverage key learnings and key collaboration experiences native to Cius in our other collaboration products."

This doesn't come entirely as a surprise as Cisco failed to even mention its first venture into the tablet space back at its Cisco Partner Summit in March. Furthermore, Cisco has historically only maintained products in technology segments where it can achieve a number one or number two market position.

This strategy seems to have paid off for Cisco as its first quarter results for 2012 beat the overall market in worldwide enterprise videoconferencing and telepresence with 30.7 percent year-over-year growth. Furthermore, Cisco continues to be the market leader in this sector, holding 50.6 percent of the market.