As we gear up for our biggest collaboration event of the year, Collaboration Summit, I thought it would be a great opportunity to kick off a blog series leading up to the announcements we’ll be making there this December about the evolution of our Collaboration Cloud Platform.
At last year’s summit, we announced Project Squared, our foray into what Gartner calls “enterprise mobile messaging,” but also a proof of concept for our entire cloud platform. We created this app, now known as Cisco Spark, to help us collaborate better internally while we built a new collaboration infrastructure from the ground up.
Infrastructure is top-of-mind for enterprises today, especially considering the rise of cloud and mobile and the increasing pressure of business leaders to make a decisive move to cloud. As our CEO Chuck Robbins noted in a recent blog, “The critical timeframe to deliver on the transformation cycle is compressing, and we all must move faster than ever before.”
It’s not possible to simply move our current infrastructures into the cloud. We saw the need for a new kind of cloud architecture reimagined to work with enterprise and partner networks in a radical way.
We built our platform with modern cloud-based technologies focused on key customer and partner concerns, including user experience, security, flexible deployment options, and ecosystem. For the first time, we can deliver the incredible experience users want built on the dynamic and secure infrastructure IT demands.
Please follow this series of blogs from our cloud team as we track the evolution of our cloud from app to platform to ecosystem, allowing each of our cloud leaders to comment on the design and technical principles behind its truly unique architecture.
The future is going to be in the cloud, but not all clouds were created equal. With digital transformation looming large in the minds of business leaders worldwide, it’s important to choose a cloud deployment model that can actually get them there.
At the Cisco Collaboration Summit, we will share all the details of how we have achieved this feat. Please join us for the keynote to hear from myself and Collaboration CTO Jonathan Rosenberg. Register today and watch on December 8 at 9:00 a.m. PST.
As a Cisco Contact Center Consulting Systems Engineer, I remember how slowly businesses moved their contact centers from PSTN to VoIP. When we started talking to our customers about Hosted Collaboration Solutions (HCS) for Contact Center, I thought acceptance would be every bit as slow as the move to VoIP–I was wrong.
With the ever-accellerating pace-of-change, most business leaders no longer have the luxury of sitting on the fence or taking a wait-and-see approach where it comes to technology advancements. They must confront cloud-based technologies, digital transformation, Internet of Things, Security, Big Data, Analytics, and Customer Experience (CX) head on.
I will definitely be following the series of blogs from our cloud team. Thanks for the article, Rowan.
Before anyone else catches my error…I meant “TDM to VoIP”.
Mr. Trollope:
I’m a big fan! Great post. I agree that cloud solutions will continue to grow in both size and types of offerings, of which collaboration is a good fit. The “cloud” moves us much closer to computing as a service, where computing resources “disappear”. We won’t even think about where computing comes from. This is much like electrical service today. I have outlets (AC power outlets or Ethernet jacks, doesn’t make a difference). Wireless power is coming (not quite as versatile as WiFi and mobile). I happen to work for a power company. It’s good to work for a company that sells something everyone needs. As good as we are we have customers that insist on the ability to generate power locally. Some use it as backup for our services where electricity is critical to their mission (think hospitals). Others generate their entire supply, considering their mission too critical to leave to public suppliers (think military).
Cloud computing will be much like electrical service; great for the masses. But there will always be a set of organizations that will be very reluctant to move services to the cloud. The reasons will be as varied as the organizations; regulatory obligations, security concerns, CapEx vs. OpEx, predictability, and perceived reliability.
My company is unlikely to move production services to the cloud for all of these reasons. With technologies such as Cisco ACI and UCS our IT department continues to become more efficient. This increase in efficiency along with the fact that we’re “capital rich and O&M poor”, and with management’s security concerns, we’ll likely move only a very small percentage of our work load to the cloud. Collaboration won’t be moved. Premise based solutions such as CWMS, Unified Communications Manager, TelePresence Conductor, and Jabber support my company. We’d love to use Spark. But our Risk Management team and company management don’t support cloud based collaboration.
I realize that over time, the number of companies that don’t move to the cloud will likely shrink. But based on feedback and ideas I see in the Cisco Collaboration Communities, there are still a large number of organizations that support only a premise based set of solutions. I would love to see Cisco offer premised based solutions in parallel with cloud offerings.
Thank you.