Cisco wins Frost and Sullivan’s 2019 Global IP Hardware Communications Endpoints Market Leadership Award

In December 2019, Frost and Sullivan recognized Cisco for providing Business phones that people want to use and evangelize for Cisco. I was honored to accept this award on behalf of the Cisco team, knowing that our Cisco IP phones are taking our customers where they want to go and beyond.

Cisco Phones are Everywhere

Have you ever noticed how often you see Cisco IP phones in businesses, airports or other places? I see them everywhere. And I’m not surprised – Cisco phones are built with quality, easy to use, and just work. No wonder they are the top-selling business phones worldwide.

It wasn’t easy making the phones work so well. Our team partnered with our customers, finding out where they wanted to go and what more we could do to make their calling and meeting experiences better. In many cases, we not only sold many phones, but we turned our customers into ambassadors who helped us grow our market share with more and more satisfied users.

We haven’t stopped there. The market is constantly changing – people have more flexible worktime and work from different places. Examples of the new work environment include the time when you’re between meetings on a business trip or when you need to start super early from home because the customer is in Asia or Europe. The workday definitely isn’t 9 to 5 like it used to be.

Different Generations, Different Ways of Working Together

We need to constantly adapt to a wide range of interests from our end users. As new graduates join the workforce, their needs are changing, as are the tools required at the desk including desk phones. People of all generations like to learn new things and work with devices that are easy to use and reliable. This is why my team at Cisco puts so much effort into making it easy for people to collaborate with each other. You can join Webex calls from a Cisco IP phone as well as from a soft client, like Webex Teams. You don’t need to search your email for the meeting ID – everything you need is one click or touch away on your laptop, tablet, smartphone or Cisco phone.

A Better Experience for All Phone Users

In 2019, the Federal Communications Commission awarded the Chairman’s Award for Advancement in Accessibility to us for a feature we developed that provides text to speech on the Cisco 8800 Series desk phones. We developed the feature in conjunction with members of the American Council for the Blind to give our visually-impaired users audible feedback on phone buttons and software functions. Another feature that helps users is mobile phone pairing, which provides users with a handset or headset-based audio from their desk phone when they get a mobile call. And soon our users will get the benefits of telemarketing call blocking and lower your voice notifications for the loud coworkers in the office, which are available in the latest phone firmware. It’s great to see so many innovations in use by our customers.

For these reasons and many others, we thank Frost and Sullivan for their recognition and invite everyone to benefit from Cisco’s ability to take you where you want to go and beyond.