NextPlane, leading providers of interoperability and federation services for collaboration solutions, recently announced a new set of federation capabilities for Cisco’s Webex Teams. NextPlane’s ConverseCloud service delivers federation and interoperability solutions for over 20 different team collaboration and UC platforms already, reaching a user base of 750,000 daily active users.
ConverseCloud’s user base can now reach Cisco Webex Teams users as if they were on the same platform, regardless of whether they’re using Microsoft Teams or any of over 20 different UC platforms. The news about Cisco Webex Teams highlights the continued growth of NextPlane’s federation capabilities with a range of Team Collaboration platforms, as NextPlane also recently announced federation with Microsoft Teams.
Expanding Options in Federation Technology
With the latest support arriving for Cisco Webex Teams, NextPlane now offers a vast selection of universal interoperability services, including solutions for all of Cisco’s tools, including Cisco Jabber. ConverseCloud acts as a sort of global interoperability hub between Team Collaboration and Unified Communication platforms. The technology performs the necessary API conversions and protocol translations to ensure that all teams, channels, presence, spaces, and chat solutions flow seamlessly between platforms.
According to the CEO of NextPlane, Farzin Shahidi, interoperability and federation are crucial tools for today’s companies. As larger brands like Cisco continue to grow their collaboration offerings like Webex Teams, IT faces a growing challenge to keep teams and users connected across all platforms. Whether it’s during a migration from one platform to another or managing a mixed-platform space, interoperability is essential. NextPlane offers tiered universal interoperability and federation service levels for Webex Teams, depending on individual company needs.
The basic federation service from NextPlane simply provides essential presence and chat functionality between Webex Teams and legacy UC platforms like Skype for Business. However, the premium version of ConverseCloud allows users to access all of the core functions of Webex Teams, including sharing status and presence, partaking in Webex Teams channels, and even sharing files. The Premium service also allows users on other collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams to collaborate with Webex Teams users via a secure federation hub.
Bringing Teams Together
Through the Management Portal on ConverseCloud, IT will be able to federate different team collaboration and unified communication platforms within the same company. Additionally, IT can also unify disparate platforms externally with partners, customers, and suppliers outside of the business. The management portal also provides 12 months of graphs and charts depicting a unique number of users, the number of messages exchanged, and more.
According to Shahidi, NextPlane will continue to keep its momentum rolling forward through 2019 with additional announcements to come up to the end of the year. The company aims to break down as many barriers to collaboration as possible in the current environment, for genuinely seamless connectivity.
