Cisco Webex News from UC Today

UC Today host Rob Scott hosts Jonathan George, Digital Collaboration Lead at Adoptt and Webex Master.

UC Today's Rob Scott hosts Jonathan George, Cisco Webex Master and Digital Collaboration lead at Adoptt. 

It's been a busy year for Cisco in the worlds of communication and collaboration. This podcast brings you all the latest news on Cisco's platforms covering new meeting features for Webex, this month's Cisco Partner Summit and all of the latest announcements relating to closer integration work with other technology providers. The usual pod team also over Cisco's acquisition of Voicea, which was announced back in September, and some of the new capabilities that this may bring to its platforms. Some new hardware devices have also been unveiled and the pod examine how these will fit in Cisco's portfolio of endpoint devices.

In the communication and collaboration industries we are always hearing about 'unity'. Whether it's within unified communications or in other areas such collaboration, integration and interoperability features are always of interest due to the benefits that they offer to users. Cisco and Microsoft have been leaders in the space for decades and have rivalling platforms in a number of key areas. In this podcast we hear how Cisco is holding firm on its premise of 'building bridges not islands' by offering a growing number of integration features with Microsoft's productivity application suite. As well that, the pod also discuss new Webex features and an interesting development in the world of Cisco digital signage. The pod team also address some questions that have been sent in by listeners. 

There have been some pretty major developments in the worlds of Cisco communication and collaboration over the past few weeks. Some further details have emerged clarifying Cisco's provision of cloud calling within its Webex platform. In this episode the guys analyse the latest news in terms of Webex Calling and PSTN provision. As well as the latest platform updates they also explore Cisco's product portfolio in terms of hardware. The new Cisco headsets complete the full stack solution which can offer a host of benefits to organisations as a whole. Get all of the latest feature update news and some speculation about possible future developments in this episode. 

It has been a little while since the last Cisco podcast. In this episode we take a look at the latest news since the final recording of 2018. There haven't been any dramatic announcements but more messaging has been coming out of the Cisco Collaboration division reaffirming their commitment to their collaboration principles. Simplification and interoperability are increasingly important but the focus on cognitive collaboration is increasing as Cisco try to use their expertise to bring more and more context into collaborative experiences.

November in the 2018 Cisco calendar has been a pretty big one. Two of the company's biggest events took place with BroadSoft Connections taking place in Miami and the Cisco Partner Summit taking place simultaneously in Las Vegas. It would seem unusual to have two of your biggest annual events taking place at the same time but the Connections event was planned prior to the announcement of Cisco's intent to acquire the UCaaS market leader in 2017. Collaboration played a huge role in both Connections and the Partner Summit. Cisco took the opportunity to announce various new integration features which will link their various platforms together more seamlessly and also took the opportunity to release various new collaboration enhancing products. In this episode the pod review all the news and speculate about how it might affect the Cisco partner world.

September has been a challenging month in the Cisco collaboration division. There has been a major outage on the Webex Teams platform which has caused serious issues for customers and partners. In this episode we discuss the causes and ramifications for Cisco. There has also been more reshuffling within the management of collaboration division so we review the lasts movers and shakers. Cisco have, despite the apparent issues and changes, been busy releasing a host of new products and features for the various collaboration platforms and we cover off all the latest news on those.

As the financial year draws to an end at Cisco we review all of the latest news and updates from the summer in their world of collaboration. Next month Cisco have their annual sales conference GSX and we examine all the features that will be discussed during the event. Normally the FY year end brings some restructuring so it will be interesting to see what will unfold. We look at updates to the Webex meeting platform including expanded device support and democratised meetings. 

As usual loads has been going on in the world of Cisco collaboration. Our monthly update for June brings you all the latest news and updates for the platforms. Webex Teams has a new user interface (UI) and our Cisco expert takes us through the main changes. The changes all tie into Cisco's drive to make the platform as simple to use as possible. Further integration with the WebEx meetings platforms has also been enabled. 

May has been a huge month for Cisco, following all the April news from their collaboration summit where they announced the end of Spark. The rebranding in full began in earnest in May. We follow up all the news and look at the changes that have come into force. Most of these changes seem to be in line with a general transition in terms of strategy from Cisco, where they are looking to focus more one product set, Webex. There was also some breaking news in terms of departures so we explore those as well. 

There have been some major changes within Cisco's collaboration unit recently with the rebrand to Webex and some senior staff departing. During a partner collaboration event in London we caught up with Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's collaboration unit Snorre Kjesbu. Snorre was presenting at the event, which took place on the top floor of the Shard building in London and we had the chance to discuss all things collaboration.

Big news came out of Phoenix, Arizona, where Cisco announced that Spark was being rebranded. Their collaboration platform had failed to gather enough notoriety in the industry so Cisco intend to capitalise on the Webex brand by renaming Spark, Webex Teams. Out Loud hear from an industry expert and Cisco partner who has more information on the reasons behind the changes and what this means for the future of Cisco collaboration. 

One of the biggest collaboration platforms globally is Cisco Spark and this new Out Loud podcast series will bring you regular updates on developments and updates within the platform. The first episode provides an overview and background for Cisco Spark as well examining the ideology behind Cisco's development of the platform.