We are thrilled that the 2019 Red Dot Awards have just been announced, and once again Cisco has been given this prestigious award, this time for our recently launched Cisco Webex Room Kit Mini video conferencing device. The Webex Room Kit Mini is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered video conferencing system custom-designed for the huddle workstyle (and we’ll highlight more about this beauty in a bit).
For the Webex video devices team, this is Red Dot Award number 23!!! To earn just one of these babies is an impressive feat. The Red Dot Award is one of the world’s largest international product competitions. Each year, around 6,000 products from 50+ countries are submitted to be judged by a panel of 40 of the best minds in design. When winning an award like this, you are in the company of Apple, Porsche, LG, Phillips, Braun, Rolls Royce, etc. Not bad company.
“I would like to congratulate the laureates sincerely on their wonderful success. The fact that their products were able to satisfy the strict criteria of the jury bears testimony to their award-winning design quality. The laureates are thus setting key trends in the design industry and are showing where future directions may lead,” said Professor Dr. Peter Zec, founder and CEO of Red Dot, in reference to the winners.
And as it relates to the video conferencing and collaboration space, no other vendor even comes close to attaining the same number of these high-quality design awards.
Quality of design is of the utmost importance to us, because it is the design that enrich our millions of Webex device users’ everyday lives, both through products that delight by their presence and the collaboration software that empowers teams to get work done. Only Cisco Webex creates a simple, consistent user experience across every work space, which is seamlessly connected to purpose-built team collaboration devices.
“We are so incredibly proud of the latest member of the RoomKit family. With the Mini, we´re managed to design in some of our most advanced technologies into such a small, simple, elegant and affordable product. This allows so many more people to benefit from our amazing video- collaboration experiences. It´s what makes our smallest product one of our greatest,” says Sondre Ager-Wick, Design Director, Webex Video Devices.
Cisco is at the forefront of transforming collaboration experiences through the power of intelligence. We know that artificial Intelligence and machine learning will change the way we collaborate and work together. But perhaps more importantly, it will change the way people interact by fostering deeper relationships. This human interaction combined with data driven intelligence will form what we call Cognitive Collaboration. And when this Cognitive Collaboration is tied together with our video devices, we believe it is a game changer. We want distributed teams to work just as well, if not better than, teams that are co-located.
The new Cisco Webex Room Kit Mini video device paired with our new Webex Meetings application and our new cognitive collaboration capabilities is revolutionizing the meeting experience. Cognitive Collaboration across our entire Webex portfolio is leading to the development of features to help create agile workplaces, including meeting attendee bio information like People Insight of Webex, speaker tracking, facial detection, noise detection, Webex Assistant, intelligent views and more.
The Room Kit Mini is critical in workplace transformation, bringing collaboration technology into huddle spaces that is easy to use and to manage in any size deployment. Announced in November 2018, it democratizes the large conference room experience by combining the codec, camera, microphones, and speakers into a single device that integrates with a 4K display. It expands workplace transformation to the small rooms and open spaces within an enterprise. Now the same premium quality video conferencing and intelligence once only found in large meetings rooms is now available sized for small spaces, with a price and manageability for large-scale deployments. The Room Kit Mini also has USB pass-thru capability to make even Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Blue Jeans users have a higher quality experience.
We are excited to earn this design award. In this video, you’ll see why we place such an emphasis on design:
There is a reason why Webex has been awarded 22 Red Dot Design Awards
Design is a HUGE part of every Webex device we create. In this video interview from our offices in Norway, learn why Cisco has won these awards. No other vendor in this space comes close to the number of design awards we've been given. See how it's done, and why it's so important…
Posted by Webex on Thursday, November 8, 2018
If you’d like to get a Room Kit Mini for yourself, please reach out to the Cisco sales team and just say, “Hook me up with a few of those Minis please!”
Congrats also for this Reddot Award – indeed the whole collab portfolio from Cisco has the best design from all vendors! Great job from the design team, very important differentiating factor within the sales process.
My only real complaint is the lack of line in and line out ports. This severely limits the rooms I can put the device into as compared to the older SX10. The next step up is a significant cost difference that will deter several of my customers from using it.
Beyond that, Ciscos lack of willingness to provide a wall mount for the touch 10 has prevented me from using it in many scenarios where I ended up being forced to use a crestron touch panel instead.