Just two months ago, Cisco substantially beefed up its web conferencing offerings with the Webex meeting scheduler, improved on-premises services for enterprise customers, and new devices for boardrooms, meeting rooms, and casual workspaces. It’s not stopping there, apparently.
During its 2018 Partner Summit in Las Vegas, the San Jose company took the wraps off of collaboration tools aimed at customers of all sizes — large, small, and somewhere in between. Among them was an expanded Cisco BroadCloud calling service, a new mobile app for dial-in management, and hardware — the Webex Roomkit mini — designed for small meeting spaces.
Perhaps the headliner is that Webex Teams, a merger of Webex and Cisco Spark that offers features such as whiteboarding, persistent messaging, guest access, and content sharing, now supports BroadCloud calling. So too does Collaboration Flex, Cisco’s user-based subscription bundle comprising on-premises, hosted, and user-based solutions.
BroadCloud calling, Cisco reiterated, is designed for companies with 100 or more employees, and allows administrators within those companies to manage a private branch exchange (PBX) — i.e., a multiline telephone system — entirely remotely. They’ve got access to a wealth of features including high-quality audio and high-definition video calling; shared lines; do not disturb mode; and call options ranging from hold, resume, and transfer to pickup and forward. And there’s a self-care portal in tow, allowing them to define rights to calls for national, premium, and international numbers and configure auto-attendants, voicemail, call forwarding, and more.
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Cisco said that BroadCloud calling is available in more than 19 countries. At launch, Flex Plan customers can sign up through Sprint, West, NWN, CenturyLink, Verizon, and Orange, with more set to join in the months ahead.
It dovetails with the debut of Cisco’s new Calling App, which enables users to take advantage of the Cisco Collaboration suite’s full range of features. They can mute, park, and transfer calls; place video calls in high definition; place calls over cellular while displaying a published business number; or, thanks to integration with Outlook and enterprise directories, quickly find contacts.
Service providers that offer Cisco Collaboration Flex Plan will private-label the app, Cisco said.
On the hardware side of the spectrum, Cisco introduced three new devices — Webex Room Kit Mini, Webex Board 55, and Webex Share — custom-tailored for the estimated 25 million small-teams spaces in offices around the globe. Cisco said they were designed with simplicity in mind; it claims its “huddle spaces” ecosystem has 20 fewer management points compared to competing vendor solutions.
“In a recent survey, we found that nearly half of all huddle spaces are ill-equipped for such tasks,” Cisco wrote. “It’s no wonder that nearly four out of five users said they are frustrated.”
Above: Cisco’s Webex Room Kit mini.
The Webex Room Kit mini — intended for teams of up to five people — has proximity sensors that fire up the screen when someone enters the room, and a microphone array designed to normalize voice volume from folks situated on either side of it. Its camera, meanwhile, has a 120-degree lens that automatically corrects for fisheye distortion.
Webex Board 55 (formerly Cisco Spark Board) — a touch-friendly, stylus-compatible 55-inch LED collaborative digital whiteboard with a built-in 4K camera and 12 microphones — is this week getting a software update that brings with it web browser access, sticky notes, and pinch-to-zoom gestures. And in related news, Cisco Webex Share — a dongle that plugs into any TV or monitor and turns it into a presentation screen when used with the Webex app — is now generally available.
All of Cisco’s new and existing meetings hardware integrate with its analytics dashboard and APIs, which allows IT teams to troubleshoot, manage, and glean usage insights from them and to create custom scripts that perform actions like updating meeting participants’ calendars.
“It’s our mission to deliver the most secure, reliable and awesome collaboration on the planet — and make that available in the simplest way for companies to buy,” Amy Chang, SVP and general manager of Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group, said. “I am so proud of what the team has done to deliver these innovations in cloud calling and huddle spaces and I can’t wait to see what customers are able to do as a result of them.”
Cisco in September said that more than 300,000 customers tap its eponymous Cisco Collaboration suite every day and log more than 6 billion meeting minutes in Webex a month, and that 1.5 million meetings rooms around the world have Cisco video devices.
