Back in 2019 is our expert Cisco guest Jonathan George, who is a Pre-sales Consultant at MeetingZone, joining Patrick to preview the new year in world of Cisco collaboration.
During the usual pleasantries Jonathan points out that early part of the year has great relevance to new technological deployments. In a similar vein to New Year’s resolutions that gradually fall by the way side, adoption of new technology seems to have an equally similar task to be maintained, if it is not planned and managed properly. The leads nicely onto some of Cisco’s focuses which are designed to ensure that users fully embrace their latest business tech platforms.
Jonathan then tells Patrick that there hasn’t been a huge amount of Cisco collaboration news since their partner summit back in November. Cisco Live took place in Barcelona at the end of January but there were no big announcements. He does explains that we have seen further commitment to their various new mantras including ‘Bridges, not islands’, simplification and winning the hearts and minds of customers.
The pod then move onto discuss the key premise of cognitive collaboration, where Cisco are aiming to provide more context within collaboration tools.
“I think that phrase ‘cognitive collaboration’ is going to be where any announcements we see, or a lot of the messaging will be, behind that as a headline.”
The reason behind this may well be that Amy Chang, SVP of Cisco Collaboration, has a background and experience in related fields. The next generation of developments may well put the principle into reality by providing additional content and background information seamlessly into collaborative spaces or meetings. Jonathan provides Patrick with some examples of how this sort of innovation could be incredibly valuable for businesses.
Jonathan also explains that the ethos of ‘Bridges, not islands’ is important for Cisco and we are likely to see them offer more integration with third party software and products. For example, now Webex meeting users can pull documents and files from Microsoft OneDrive into a meeting and collaborate on those together. This sort of development represents a recognition that customers will not need Cisco for every aspect of their collaboration journeys.
“If you are starting to talk about collaboration, not only do people want that real-time collaboration, the stuff that Cisco historically have been very good at, but there is that asynchronous collaboration, that collaboration around content which has been Microsoft’s strong suit.”
Offering integration with third party software providers and providing other integration with hardware manufactures puts the Cisco proposition in a strong position across the industry. Finally Patrick and Jonathan look ahead to imagine what the rest of 2019 might bring when it comes to Cisco’s collaboration development.
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Presenter and Tech Journalist Patrick Watson and expert guest Jonathan George.
