Aragon Research Annual Report Names Cisco a Leader in Web and Video Conferencing

Aragon Research just revealed its annual Web and Video Conferencing report and it’s no surprise to us that Cisco is positioned as a Leader. I’m really excited to see Cisco Webex once again placed highly among recent head-to-head comparisons in the Web and Video Conferencing market. We’ve been committed to making sure our users get the best meetings experience on the market for over 10 years.

The Aragon Research Globe for Web and Video Conferencing report examined 20 major providers in the web and video conferencing market. Aragon states that as the demand for visual collaboration heats up and cloud continues to drive new use cases and innovation, visual collaboration has become a strategic way to enhance the overall customer journey.

Cisco is named a Leader in the report, which mean we’ve demonstrated effectiveness in delivering comprehensive solutions that meet market demand in the evolving Web and Video Conferencing industry.

Here are a few of the reasons why Cisco stands above competitive solutions to be a market leader.

Video-First

The latest Webex video-first interface and ability to scale voice and video meetings were mentioned in the Aragon Research report as a major factors that helped attribute to our leadership position. Last year’s major release of Webex unveiled a dramatically reimagined user experience, heavily designed around what we’ve learned from you and from hosting 6.5+ billion meeting minutes per month, for over 130 million monthly users all around the globe.

It is no wonder that we saw more that 50% increase in video usage in the first few months of the new Webex. We’ve seen more and more of you rely on video-based meetings to get things done; and you want to be able to do it on any device, from anywhere in the world whether inside or outside of the firewall, around the globe. Cisco has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in a network that was purpose built for video. The Webex backbone is a worldwide IP network backbone built over the last 10 years – with interconnect points around the world. It connects all our data centers with redundant paths at scale. Traffic on this backbone is optimized for media and we remove as many choke points as possible while still providing a highly secure network. Video conferencing is the new normal way to work, and Cisco Webex was purposefully designed to bring you that much closer to interacting and collaborating with your teams in the same room.

Cognitive Collaboration Built in to Our Software and Hardware

The report also cites that “going fully digital requires intelligence, and that means meetings need to be automated.” Cisco Webex offers a more integrated and intelligent experience across not only our hardware and software, calling, meetings, and team tools portfolio but also with third-party solutions like Microsoft O365, Microsoft Teams, Slack, salesforce.com, Facebook, and more.

Going fully digital requires intelligence, and that means meetings need to be automated. Intelligent Video Rooms leverage Artificial Intelligence to understand what is going on with the active meeting, and the devices and the users who are involved.~ Aragon Research Globe for Web and Video Conferencing 2019 report

The report also says, “intelligent video rooms leverage artificial intelligence to understand what is going on with the active meeting, and the devices and the users who are involved.” We saw this coming years ago and why we’ve been building intelligence across our Webex software and hardware to transform the team collaboration experience and to make your video-centric meetings even better. Webex includes innovations like facial recognition, noise suppression, as well as bots that help you to automate things like scheduling meetings, booking meeting space, and sharing documents and video. And integrations with third-party LMS (learning management systems) from Microsoft, Salesforce, and others help to simplify and automate the login process. Cisco is totally focused on this strategy of bringing these element of cognitive collaboration to the meeting experience to drive productivity and efficiency.

Personalized Collaboration – Designed to Fit the Many Ways You Choose to Meet, Share, and Reach Audiences

Cisco supports all five of the key use cases identified in the report (Video Meeting, Room-based Video Conferencing, Webcasting, Webinars, and Virtual Classroom) and so much more. That’s because Cisco Webex is designed to fit the many ways people choose to meet, share information, and reach their audiences and teams today. At Cisco, we know you are no longer limited to the four walls of your buildings or tied to a desk. Your collaboration solutions need to fit into your workflows and not the other way around. You are mobile, and just as likely to meet, collaborate, and share content with your teams and audiences in the breakroom, around an open workplace table or in a coffee shop as you are in a boardroom or studio.

This is where Webex shines. It’s designed to meet you where you meet, including smaller places like huddle spaces, so we’ve built office space solutions and tools to address these new ways you are meeting and collaborating. We’ve introduced solutions like the Cisco Webex Share which is a portable device that turns any screen into a wireless content sharing device. And the Cisco Webex Room Kit Mini, which is designed for smaller spaces, with the same intelligence but smaller footprint than our larger Room Kit series.

These are just a few of the areas where Cisco and Webex are winning when it comes to Web and Video Conferencing. Be sure to check out the 2019 Aragon Research Globe for Web and Video Conferencing report to get a deeper dive in to this.

See more in the the Aragon Research Globe Web and Video Conferencing report page.

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