Analysts’ Day: The Experts are Impressed with Cognitive Collaboration

Cisco’s Collaboration Vision Receives Third Party Validation

It’s certainly a great feeling when industry analysts – those people charged with the responsibility of knowing the market and scrutinizing its players – come out on social media with positive assessments of a company and its products. This is what happened to us at our analyst-only event in the John T. Chambers Executive Briefing Center in San Jose recently, and of course it’s a milestone of pride and achievement for us. It certainly helps us to confirm we are on track in terms of our direction and alignment with customer needs.

This event allowed us to reveal what Amy Chang and her team have been up to over the past few months, with the centerpiece being our cognitive collaboration solution. The analysts had a chance to talk to us and nod their heads a little as they matched up our new developments with equally impressive stats on our group’s year-over-year growth of 24%. Their commentary reflects their impression of Cisco as a vibrant and innovative company in the technology-and-people space. Our decades in the business, paired with forward-looking leadership and a highly experienced team have succeeded in keeping our outlook fresh, exciting, and in the words of Dave Michels, “flexible, disciplined, and ready to win.”

Zeus Kerravala, writing for NoJitter.com, was impressed by the way data is used in a cognitive enabled collaboration space to allow greater human engagement across distributed teams in real-time. He writes: “The use cases require shifting the focus of collaboration from being a set of applications that constantly require the user to pull data to one where information is pushed in a way that’s quickly digestible…we have so much data available today and now we need help understanding what it means.”

Dominic Black, writing for Cavell Group, was taken by the fact we have already put our concept of “building bridges, not islands,” into action, delivering “a consistent experience to their customers regardless of solution [and easing] that migration path for any customers moving to the cloud.” He singles out our value proposition that the cognitive collaboration suite is “cloud-first but not cloud only.” He, too, was excited about our capacity to deliver contextual data to all aspects of the collaboration process.

“Our main takeaway is that Cisco is bringing together what used to be loosely connected technologies into a tightly integrated portfolio that is aligned with key trends in business communications and collaboration, including an improved user experience and a strong focus on workflow integration,” said Raul Castanon-Martinez of 451 Research.

Dave Michels, in his video for TalkingPointz, listed a number of notable developments. He highlighted a “growing set of capabilities” delivering “context and intelligence to improve the UX.” Our approach to data security also stood out for him. He had great things to say about our Collaboration Technology Group team, and our focus on execution and discipline.

Cognitive is the Future of Collaboration

This last point might sound like I’m being self-congratulatory, but in truth, I feel our laser focus on the way we collaborate as a team will completely transfer into the quality of the product, service, and support that we build into our enterprise and customer contact center solutions. How could it not?

I am thrilled to see the analysts’ remarks as they spread out across the media wires. It shows our vision is on track, and we are set to deliver.

Cognitive collaboration is what people need now: leveraging the enormous power of artificial intelligence (AI) to help them communicate and collaborate with resources and data that is instantly available and effortlessly accessible.

We can’t wait to share this with the world at Enterprise Connect on March 19th. All the exciting product launches and keynotes will be available on our social media channels, especially Twitter at #CiscoCollabEC19.

To read the posts from the Analyst Summit analysts themselves, follow these links:

Cisco Highlights ‘Cognitive Collaboration’ at Analyst Summit

Cisco’s new collaboration team deliver strong revenue growth and coherent strategy moving into 2019

Out Loud: Cisco’s Cognitive Collaboration

Initial Thoughts #CiscoCollabAnalystSummit

Meet the New Boss – Cisco Collaboration Analyst Summit