Cisco Systems moved to raise the bar once again in the collaboration space through launch of a series of new products at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in San Francisco today. The announcements cover the spectrum of Cisco collaboration products, highlighting Cisco efforts to integrate voice, video and text via the new Medianet network platform, to build bridges between various Cisco collaboration tools and third-party platforms and devices, and to draw the power of social networking into the Cisco enterprise fold.
Cisco’s product innovations are designed to address the needs of a workplace revolution that has been underway for some time. Driven by globalization, corporate green agendas and the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce, businesses now require new collaboration experiences to support new ways of doing work. Arranged in dynamic and dispersed teams and working with a plethora of information sources from a broad range of media, knowledge workers now require a new set of productivity tools to help them connect to the right resources within secure and targeted communities. According to Cisco Canada’s Director of Collaboration, Suzanne Kilner, collaboration has become absolutely essential to organizations that are looking to grow their businesses, and Cisco innovation around the network has provided the means for organizations to draw together multiple resources and to deliver information across multiple platforms.
One of the key themes that has emerged from the current round of collaboration announcements is interoperability, which is some ways represents a more recent focus for Cisco. A good example of this new intent to ‘collaborate’ is apparent in enhancements to TelePresence, Cisco’s flagship communications product. The new TelePresence WebEx Engage, for example, establishes a bridge between TelePresence sessions and the WebEx communications platform to include remote workers, who are able with one button touch to automatically share audio, video, and text projections. Through this bridge, Cisco has extended TelePresence to wherever a participant has a PC - or iPhone or Blackberry. In addition to working across platforms and different devices, Cisco has introduced the TelePresence Media Experience Engine which established interoperability with other HD systems (now integrates with Polycom, Tandberg, Sony) and through the Media Exchange Engine between high and low definition video conferencing systems – with the goal of enabling TelePresence presentations on various devices. And to help customers begin to build out their own TelePresence partner ecosystems, Cisco has launched the Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory which identifies other TelePresence companies and locations, and helps with session scheduling.
