The BroadSoft Connections event is normally dominated by communication based topics. We bought you the news yesterday relating to Cisco's new Cloud Calling Application and BroadCloud Calling being added to the Flex Plan, but today collaboration technology took centre stage.
Cisco have made some major product announcements to bolster their proposition in collaboration and meeting rooms. During this year's Connections event UC Today spoke to Lorrissa Horton, the General Manager for Webex Teams, and Tom Richards, Director of Product Management for the TelePresence Systems Business Unit, to get more information on the latest news and take a look at the collaboration market in general.
Firstly, Cisco have continued their strong provision within the meeting or huddle room space. Targeting the smaller meeting with up to five users they have announced the release of the brand new Webex Room Kit Mini. Although one target market for the new kit is the micro space, Cisco have still chosen to make a host of enterprise class features available within the solution. It will leverage AI technology within its cameras and microphones to try and create an identical experience to those generated by Cisco's more enterprise level meeting solutions. As well as being suitable for small enclosed spaces, Horton explains that due to its innovative design features it would also be ideal for use in large open plan offices where a smaller meeting area is needed.
"With the Room Kit Mini we have really focused on having that advanced microphone array which captures all the audio directly in front of the device while being able to ignore all of the background sound you don't want within a space. So now you can take any TV you have in a space put a Room Kit Mini on it and use it for conferencing without having to worry about all the sound in the background."
The system enables various features all designed to maintain Cisco's ethos around meeting simplicity. Webex Room Kit Mini will 'wake up' when participants enter a room, or its proximity, to completely remove the configuration element and it will also enable the 'one button' principle for joining meetings.
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Webex Room Kit Mini[/caption]
The cameras will also enhance the capabilities for video framing and definition, allowing all participants to be represented on a group video call. A persistent problem within professional meeting spaces, framing of video can now be massively improved by innovative solutions utilising the most advanced camera technology. Richards tells us more about how the Webex Room Kit Mini leverages a common chipset which Cisco have unified across their collaboration hardware portfolio, offering various advantages.
"One of the key criteria on which we selected that chipset was that it was capable of doing some pretty serious processing for AI. That means things like, not just face detection, but facial recognition are possible across all of the camera enabled devices. The hardware is future proofed. We also want to examine other possibilities as we move forward around recognising what people are doing within a meeting."
The capabilities of the hardware allow Cisco to explore the possibility of being able to understand behaviour within a meeting, whether that be engagement with the subject matter, for example.
We also used Connections 2018 to take a closer look at the new Webex Share device. Many screens utilised within organisations have little, or no, capacity for collaboration. Cisco are aiming to rectify this for Webex Teams or Webex Meetings customers with the new device.
