There’s a Billion Ways to Use Cisco Webex Board

The Digital Whiteboard for Modern Business Challenges

“A thing of beauty, isn’t it? All written out like this?” Those are the words of Douglas Mason, talking with Taylor Mason in the March 31 episode of Billions, the hugely popular high-stakes drama about finance and power that airs on Showtime. Billions dramatizes the lives and conflicts of a collection of characters who occupy the very top canopy of the financial jungle. These are people who wrestle over countless complex deals, trades, and companies, and who consequently count their victories and their personal wealth in billions of dollars. And they use Webex for digital whiteboarding and rich media team collaboration.

Did you notice?

In the March 31 episode, Taylor Mason Capital is up and running and everything needs to be best-in-class. As Taylor and Douglas work together to solve a complex derivative formula, they turn to their Webex Board to construct the notation together. They handwrite on the digital whiteboard and then step back to review their work. They talk. They debate. Most importantly, they end up knowing where they have to be and what they have to do.

The Webex Board Fits Right In for Team Collaboration!

The setting and structure of the Taylor Mason Capital office is clean and sleek. There is a sense of control and momentum in the people and the building. This is a place where business gets done. Every element of the surroundings is there to ensure their hand-picked team is capable of nothing but the best. So of course there’s a Webex Board there. The very presence of this all-in-one-device digital whiteboard speaks volumes: it’s as natural for this team of brilliant people to have this Webex Board already in place as it is for them to have top-notch security and collaboration devices surrounding them, and top-of-class professionals working with them.

The Webex Board from Cisco is just one of our flagship video collaboration tools, and it’s one we’re extremely proud of. It’s not just for jet-set billionaires, of course, and that’s something else we are proud of. It’s affordable and accessible for all types of businesses. The quality is there for everyone to use. And it always delivers. It has leapfrogged out of the pool of traditional “electronic whiteboards” and demonstrates just how well and how deeply it can pull human ingenuity into the sphere of connected technology, and then push it out the other side with ideas, creativity, and productivity clearly enhanced.

The Webex Board is in fact much more than a digital whiteboard. It also provides the same video conferencing and wireless presentation screen sharing services that are supported on our other rich media collaboration devices like the Webex DX 80 and Webex Room series.  Using the Webex Teams app, even remote users calling in from a PC or mobile device can join the meeting to drive important business forward. And that’s what this is about: bringing more intelligence and usability to meeting rooms of any size. It’s the beginning of a whole new era of team collaboration.

Intelligent Collaboration is Critical in Modern Business

Billions might be a fictional show, and Taylor Mason Capital a fictional firm, but as with many riveting dramas produced by Showtime and others, they reflect the issues of the day, and have both feet firmly planted in today’s realities.

Collaboration is more critical than ever. Teams must be able to meet, collaborate, and work through ideas and problems quickly. It is not realistic to rely on outdated meeting techniques and analog tools. People must get on the same page right away, to foster understanding without ambiguity, and maximize output in a way that exceeds the “sum of the parts.”

Today’s tools – from videoconferencing and digital whiteboarding to rich media collaboration and wireless sharing – must be accessible enough, intelligent enough, and flexible enough to ensure that every person is in the loop, whether they are all in the same room or spread out across the globe. Every one of them must be able to participate to the fullest.

The Lesson: The Intimacy of Collaboration

New, intelligent Webex technologies play an intimate role in solving problems and communicating. They become part of the people who use them, proactively recognizing and understanding faces, words, and context in a way that no other productivity devices have been able to do.

Meetings have used visual tools for decades, from flip charts to PowerPoint to videoconferencing. But until now these tools have been static and inflexible, conditioning others to dread meetings rather than strive for a substantive outcome.

What the Webex Board does is show just how effortlessly and seamlessly the technology fits into the thinking patterns and actions of the people in the room. In this Billions scene, there are just the two of them, but there could easily be more people, in other rooms in other buildings and cities digital whiteboarding in real time with Taylor and Douglas, solving problems, sharing the insight in an uninterrupted, maximized workflow that will lead to exemplary progress in the meeting and beyond.

People should no longer just move from point to point, instead you move along a continuum of creativity, with communication being the permanent center.

This is what the leading-edge performers know – both on screen and in real life. Business might move fast but Webex is already there.