Taking a Moment to Reflect on Cisco Spark

We’re busy here in Cisco Collaboration – so busy that sometimes I feel like we’re moving at warp speed. We’re driving amazing traction with Cisco Spark, leading everywhere we can with it. “Call, Message, and Meet” is central to our strategy. And it’s on fire! We have announced partnerships and acquisitions to innovate and extend the offering.

But when you’re at warp speed, sometimes you don’t take the time to reflect on where you’ve been or what you’ve done. With today’s acquisition of Worklife, it made me pause to think about the last few months…

What have we done?

Partnered with IBM to bring artificial intelligence to Spark with Watson to improve collaboration

Delivered what we promised with Apple to make Spark better for the mobile workforce

Struck an alliance with Salesforce to natively embed Spark for Salesforce users and make it easy to collaborate

Created a $150M Innovation Fund to enable more partners than ever before to integrate and extend Spark

Acquired Tropo to extend offers, customizations, and integrations in Spark

Acquired Synata to enhance search capabilities in Message

…and today, added Worklife to our portfolio, which will make meetings even better!

The acquisition of Worklife underlines how important productive meetings are in today’s world. If that sounds like a natural fit for WebEx and Cisco Spark, it is. Worklife expands beyond the now – the in-meeting experience – to pre- and post-meeting capabilities like agendas, templates, notes, co-editing, tasks, and meeting previews. It’s about helping users stay engaged before, during, and after meetings. I’m excited to integrate these tools into Spark.

I’m glad I took a moment to reflect on our effort. We’ve done a lot. I’m so proud of our teams, and looking forward to seeing what comes next. We’re not standing still nor backing down on our goal to get Spark in everyone’s hands!

Please let me know what you think via Twitter at @jensmeggers.