It’s been a busy Cisco Live so far this week, including multiple exciting Webex-related launches and a particularly intriguing AI-powered cloud security solution.
The Room Bar Pro
The Room Bar Pro has been announced as a device designed to maximise the collaboration potential of Cisco’s RoomOS platform.
The Pro is an easy-to-deploy video bar with substantial processing power, multiple connections, touchscreen integration, and advanced AI capabilities built into Cisco’s RoomOS platform. Using an NVIDIA processor, the Pro contains the power needed to support tomorrow’s meeting advancements while being intuitive and simple to manage.
Snorre Kjesbu, Senior Vice President & General Manager of Webex Devices at Cisco, wrote in a blog post:
As our sector continues to innovate ever-advancing experiences for the future-of-meetings, organizations need powerful technology that can support it– today and tomorrow. Simultaneously, organizations need technologies that can be mass deployed, so that intelligent experiences can be scaled to every conference room, not just the boardroom.”
Cisco recently announced “cinematic meetings”, an AI-powered feature embedded within RoomOS to dynamically change the camerawork of the meeting to give participants the best view at any moment. The Pro will incorporate this solution.
The Pro is optimised for medium workspaces of roughly five to twelve seats. It possesses a dual camera system that has extensive reach to frame everyone in the room in ultra-high quality definition, even when participants sit at the ends of the table.
Cisco and Microsoft Partner for Teams Rooms-certified Cisco Devices
Cisco had previously announced that Cisco devices would support a native Microsoft Teams Rooms experience. This week, Cisco revealed a range of certified devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms. These include the Cisco Room Bar, the Cisco Board Pro, the Cisco Desk Pro, and the newly announced Cisco Room Bar Pro. The intention is for IT teams to be able to deploy the experience across a range of meeting rooms and desktop workspaces.
Also powered by Cisco’s RoomOS, customers who use a native Teams Room experience will have access to Cisco’s added capabilities, including built-in audio and video intelligence, such as noise removal and Frames.
Customers can join both Teams and fully-featured Webex meetings with the same join experience across both platforms. All certified devices can be managed via the Teams Admin Center, Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal, and the Cisco Control Hub device management.
‘Control Hub’ Announcement
Cisco also revealed a new device management solution named “Control Hub”.
Control Hub provides IT teams or business leaders with a birds-eye view of workspaces while giving multiple filtering options. With this aggregate view, admins can track Cisco (or partner) devices in each room and monitor the health of the devices’ connections.
IT teams can even track environmental data, including room temperature and humidity. The Control Hub’s usage data and workspace insights allow users to make informed decisions about their deployments. An example might be IT Teams understanding which room might be the most popular and which rooms are sized just right or overcrowded. They can also track which rooms are most used for scheduled vs ad-hoc meetings.
The solution addresses the collaboration management needs of a hybrid working workplace.
“In today’s hybrid world, organisations need to video-enable their workspaces to account for remote meeting participants,” Kjesbu wrote. “And with additional technology, IT teams experience additional management lift. With global HQs and hundreds of workspaces, the old-fashioned ‘walk-the-floor’ is not feasible for many enterprises. IT teams require centralised access to workspace insights from wherever they are.”
Cisco also announced the ThousandEyes vantage points solution for RoomOS devices. This will enable IT teams to quickly identify and resolve issues with calls and meetings by visualising the entire network path of those services. This will be available by activation through Control Hub.
Control Hub will be generally available this September.
Cisco’s New Generative AI Feature Creates Meeting Recaps
Webex is introducing generative AI to its collaboration platform, intending to increase productivity through automated conversation and meeting recaps.
The new summarization features enable users to catch up on missed meetings, extract the most important information from conversations, or derive the most significant action items from a meeting. The capabilities are also included in Cisco’s asynchronous Vidcast tool and the Webex Contact Centre.
Jeetu Patel, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Security and Collaboration at Cisco, commented:
Generative AI will quickly become pervasive as we see businesses and workers embrace the technology to become materially more productive. At Cisco, we’ve been using AI for years. Now we’re unveiling how we’re incorporating generative AI into our existing products, helping customers drive real value to unlock the most secure, unrivalled work experiences possible.”
The specific capabilities include “Catch Me Up”, which allows users to catch up on missed interactions, including meetings, calling and conversations.
Generative AI will produce meeting summaries with key points and action items. Users can opt-in to automatically create the necessary information of a Webex call, infer the key takeaways, and confirm action items with owners. This feature intends to save time for both attendees and those unable to attend the meeting without the need to read or listen to a transcript.
There will be summaries in Vidcast, Cisco’s video messaging tool, creating highlights and chapters so users can navigate to the most important sections of a video.
The Webex Contact Centre will also be updated with generative AI capabilities. Conversation summaries will empower agents with a more concise approach to digesting long-form text from digital chats with customers. It will also help with post-call wrap-up and resolution with customers. These chat summaries offer the agent a summarization of issues and resolutions already explored through self-service. The offering includes a summary of the call for both the agent and customer once it ends.
AI’s Impact on Cloud Security, Moving ‘From Complex to Conversational’
Cisco previewed new generative AI capabilities to simplify security policy management and improve threat response to deliver on its Security Cloud ambition. Cisco AI and machine learning investments aim to empower security staff by simplifying operations and increasing effectiveness.
The Cisco Security Cloud will leverage a generative AI Policy Assistant to address the issue of security policy management complexity. The Security Cloud will allow security and IT admins to create detailed security policy prompts and evaluate how to best establish them across every corner aspects of an organisation’s security infrastructure.
An example illustrated at Cisco Live showed how the Cisco Policy Assistant could reason with an existing firewall policy to introduce and simplify rules within the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center.
SSE News Continues Cisco’s Ambition of More Secure Collaboration
There have been other compelling security announcements at Cisco Live this week, including one exciting AI-powered reveal in the form of a new Cisco security service edge (SSE) solution. The Cisco Secure Access offering intends to support better hybrid work experiences and simplify access across any location, device, and application.
Cisco Secure Access involves a common user access experience, delivering easy access to all applications and resources by intelligently and securely steering traffic to private and public destinations. The service simplifies security operations by building multiple functions into one easy-to-use solution that protects all traffic. Lastly, it provides analysis to speed up threat detection and response investigations and blocking, backed by Cisco Talos’s AI-driven threat intelligence.
Cisco Secure Access maintains Cisco’s interest in bolstering security across Webex and its range of other solutions in the era of hybrid working. Last month, Spectrum Enterprise partnered with Cisco to enhance business cybersecurity solutions.
Spectrum introduced Secure Access with Cisco Duo and Cloud Security with Cisco+ Secure Connect to its portfolio. The plan was to allow organisations to provide secure, simple ways for employees and stakeholders to access business-sensitive information and applications on private networks and public clouds.
In April, Cisco was among the major vendors for whom cloud-based email security vendor Abnormal Security launched new threat detection capabilities. Abnormal’s three new email-centric products were designed to help Cisco platform users detect suspicious messages, remedy compromised accounts, and provide data and management services for security posture.
