The Cisco Unified Cloud Platform Continues to Lead in Workplace Transformation – Promises Made, Promises Kept

Our customers turn to Cisco to transform their workplaces from pocket to desk to meeting room to boardroom and to contact center, empowering extraordinary teams. Cognitive Collaboration marks the next wave of innovation that will drive transformative experiences for teams. While that is true, we are not losing sight of continuing to innovate on our unified platform – across call, message, meet, devices, and business process integrations. Cognitive Collaboration will naturally embed itself across this platform.

As we ‘build bridges, not islands,’ we are bringing consistency of experience and usability across this unified platform. Persistence and awareness in collaboration are our strengths, and tablestakes for today’s knowledge worker. As we all know, these users work in not only collaboration tools, but in their respective business processes. Hence, it is also imperative we provide them with personalized collaboration that reduces friction and context switching, while providing easy information flow between collaboration and business process.

Our promise to innovate on our platform is not negotiable even as we add Cognitive Collaboration. Today we serve 200 million users every month across the globe on this platform, with 125B meeting minutes, 15 billion calls, and 48 billion messages sent annually. Thank you! These numbers are a testament to how much people love to use our products and services, and how much they accelerate teams’ capabilities. Today, we are excited to introduce the following new capabilities on our unified platform.

Webex enables an increasingly global workforce with call, message and meet

Webex Teams is our Team Collaboration Solution that provides not only persistent messaging, calling and meetings, but also essential ingredients for teams – whiteboarding, file sharing, and integration with productivity tools, making it a one-stop shop for all their secure collaboration needs. We are adding a few important capabilities to our Webex Teams. They are:

Use your existing document storage with our team collaboration

We delivered Enterprise Content Management with OneDrive and SharePoint online, but we aren’t stopping there. Now, we’re targeting tighter Google Drive integrations with Webex Teams. Box and Dropbox support will follow G Suite.

Bring cloud innovation to your on-premises calling infrastructure

We care for you as our customers. Your investment is protected. Now, Webex Teams and the full set of cloud-based meet, message, and business process integration attach to your CUCM/HCS installation.

Integrate with your 3rd party on-premises calling

You can easily integrate your existing 3rd party calling clients, such as Skype for Business, directly into Webex Teams so that you can still enjoy the combined call, message, and meet experience.

Jabber with Webex Teams based persistent messaging

In addition to chat in Jabber, we are adding cloud based persistent messaging by integrating Webex Teams right into Jabber. Yet another example of cloud innovation right into our customers on-premises installation.

Video-first Webex Meetings keep getting better

We’re laser-focused on delivering the best possible experience to everyone using Webex Meetings. We want meetings to be intuitive, easy, and smart so that teams can be productive. We unveiled a new set of capabilities designed to do just that.

Smoothly share live motion video

Now, you can share video content and animation in high resolution at 30 frames per second. Everyone in the meeting can watch full motion video from sources like YouTube.

Whiteboarding makes Webex Meetings more productive

Now users of Webex Boards can join Webex Meetings and start sharing their whiteboards and annotations with all participants, irrespective of their device or client.

Improved video in Webex Events

We’ve also extended video support to all video devices and endpoints for panelists within Webex Events. You can now scale your Webex events by inviting up to 200 device participants in a single event, supporting an almost infinite number of participants.

New VDI client for Cisco Webex Meetings

We are launching a new Webex Meetings VDI application to join Webex Meetings from a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) client. Meetings are connected as a SIP call, delivering both audio and video with a single join experience.

Cisco Webex now with cloud calling powered by Cisco BroadCloud

Enterprises today are turning to cloud collaboration solutions that keep them on the cutting edge of innovation while helping them reduce operational expense. But they have been hesitant to deploy cloud solutions due to scalability, functionality, reliability, and security concerns. The new Webex Calling solution solves these issues.

Proven enterprise-grade native cloud calling capabilities

The Cisco BroadCloud platform delivers a native cloud service that is feature rich, scalable, reliable, and secure.

Webex Teams powered unified communications

The new calling capabilities are integrated into the Webex Teams collaboration experience and support advanced team collaboration capabilities including enterprise messaging and Webex Meetings.

Global availability and support

The offer will be available initially in North American with General availability on March 31st, with a phased 2019 roll-out across 35 countries including most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

New offer available from the highly trusted Cisco enterprise channels

The offer will be marketed as part of the Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan, and 19 North American partners have already signed-up to deliver the service.

Device integration simplifies manageability and enhances user experience

The industry leading Cisco phone and headset portfolios, including the 6800, 7800 and 8000 series phones, and the 530 and 560 headset families, are integrated with the Webex suite to improve user experience and IT management, deployment and support.

Creating a “better than being there” experience

Webex Devices foster deeper engagement across teams and across boundaries, from huddle spaces to board rooms. We’re excited to announce additional capabilities that enhance all aspects of this experience, from management to the user experience.

Wirelessly share to any Webex Device from any Webex app

Webex proximity automatically detects Webex devices in your vicinity. This enables you to join meetings and wirelessly share content at 30fps from any Webex client.

Enable Workplace Services to optimize space utilization

Webex Devices already provide real-time information about room occupancy and engagement collected through our intelligent cameras and microphones.  Now our rich APIs expose this data, enabling partners and Workplace Managers to report and analyze real estate utilization.

Use your Webex Device to get your message across the organization

Working with partners, we have enabled Webex Devices to be used for digital signage when not in meetings.

Enhance engagement and co-creation with Companion Mode

Add a Webex Board to a meeting room with a Webex Room Video Device. The new Companion Mode allows you to view multiple video content sources with an immersive experience, while providing a full white boarding experience to create rich engagement.

Digital stickies redefine agile team collaboration

Now both in-person on the Webex Board and remote participants on Webex apps can easily create, modify, and move sticky notes.  The sticky canvas is available to the entire team at any time, even after the meeting ends. Truly “better than being there.”

Cognitive Contact Center: Cloud analytics and AI powered customer experiences

We have some exciting enhancements to our Customer Journey Solutions portfolio that leverage the power of cloud analytics and AI to deliver cognitive, highly personalized, and collaborative customer experiences.

Cloud analytics available for on-premises contact center

Continuing to bring innovation to our on-premises base, our cloud analytics reporting service will be available with Cisco on-premises contact center deployments. This will enable you to leverage data from multiple sources across your entire organization to provide actionable insights about your customers.

Intelligent agent for smarter responses

Cisco Answers is our new cloud-based intelligent agent that provides contextual assistance in real time to your agents, such as process guidelines, pricing, membership benefits, and other key information, while they’re interacting with a customer.

Enhanced BOT self-service assistance

The Customer Virtual Assistant is an integrated BOT self-service capability for handling simple and specific requests that don’t always require a live agent. The BOT chat interaction can easily escalate to an agent chat, bringing along with it the history of the conversation to enable a seamless transition.

While we’re making Cognitive Collaboration a reality, we won’t lose sight of the promises we’ve already made, like simplifying, creating a single, unified portfolio and interoperating with the products our customers already have in place. As you can see from the list here, we’re delivering! We are open and interoperable. We are continuing to build bridges across call, message, meet, devices and contact center. You will see us provide unified experiences across every collaboration need. Jabber has now brought together call, message, and meet for our on-premises installations with effective transitions to the cloud. Webex Teams is well on the way to providing the same unified capabilities.

Check out our great portfolio of products to transform your organization at webex.com.

For a complete recap of the Cisco Cognitive Collaboration announcement, read the following articles:

Announcing the New Cognitive and Collaborative Contact Center

Calling in Webex Teams Now Powered by Cisco BroadCloud

66% Say They’d Switch Vendors in Order to Get an Intelligent Online Meeting Solution

What is Cognitive Collaboration?