Has the collaborative experience become more human? Maybe the marketing line should read:
Technology has advanced to give us more choice in the devices, applications, and locations of our work.
But what does that mean to me as a person? Let’s think about what makes up today’s collaborative experience by looking back at where we started not so long ago. Read More »
At Enterprise Connect last week, Cisco Jabber and Cisco TelePresence weren’t the only stars of the show. Cisco’s desktop virtualization thin clients, Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC), were getting quite a bit of attention also. Some may find this surprising since Enterprise Connect has traditionally been considered a “voice” show. But just as the market has moved beyond voice to more mobile, social and visual collaboration, it has also evolved to a world of virtual collaboration. With the resulting unexpected benefit of unification of the complete office desktop, which in turn enables a variety of mobile strategies, many companies are now reconsidering their virtual desktop projects as voice and video become a must have for the users.
Last year at Enterprise Connect, we discussed how Cisco is helping customers address the challenges with Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI), Cisco’s end to end virtual workspace solution with new desktop virtualization clients. In addition to the VXC 2000 series that were featured on the Exhibition Hall, we offered Cisco NDA sessions on VXI, where we demonstrated a new thin client we were working on, VXC 6215.
Last week, we demoed this new device in the Enterprise Connect Exhibit Hall and got a lot of interest from the conference attendees. The attendees immediately understood the value of VXC 6215, which unifies virtual desktops with voice and video, all in one device, without compromising the user experience. Many of them used the word “smart” to describe how VXC 6215 eliminates the classic “hairpin” issue that is associated with today’s traditional desktop virtualization thin clients when voice and video is not separated from the display protocol. With VXC 6215, we’ve applied the network intelligence to route voice and video traffic, point to point, without traversing back to the data center.
VXC 6215 is available and shipping today. Read More »
The March 2012 issue of Customer Relationship Management Magazine presents the editors’ annual Service Leader awards. Building on our success in previous contests, Cisco customer care products received awards in two categories this year.
For the first time ever, Cisco claimed the top spot among Interactive Voice Response vendors, standing out in particular for our “company direction and depth of functionality” in IVR. This award underscores Cisco’s continued success in this market, where we were recognized last summer as the world’s leading IVR vendor.
Cisco was also applauded by CRM Magazine as a “Leader” in Contact Center Infrastructure. Noted industry analyst Paul Stockford commented that, “In the past couple of years, Cisco has rocketed past the competition with a sharp focus on the future of the contact center and the demonstrated ability to deliver on its vision.”
Today’s enterprise employees don’t access e-mail from just their desktop computers. Whether they are working in their office or pulled into a mission critical meeting, working remotely, or on the go and accessing work via their mobile devices – they need to be able to collaborate on their own terms. As a market leader in collaboration Cisco is continuing to address this need; today, we are announcing new solutions at Enterprise Connect that advance the idea of people-centric collaboration – connecting people instead of devices. Cisco’s news is all about providing customers with a wide range of integrated and interoperable collaboration options so users can connect and collaborate with their peers from any device, at any time.
First, Cisco is introducing the new Jabber for iPad and Jabber for Windows. These new clients build on previous Jabber announcements that include Jabber for Android, iOS, Mac, BlackBerry and Cisco Cius tablets. Today’s announcement provides customers using a wide range of major devices with collaboration capabilities, including:
high quality video
voice, presence
IM
conferencing
visual voicemail
With Jabber, users are able to have a cohesive user experience across any platform and collaborate the way that they prefer. For example, Cisco Jabber for iPad provides high definition video calling, including seamless integration with Cisco’s TelePresence solutions within the enterprise. Check out the video clip below, part of a demo from our upcoming Collaboration Announcements Webcast; Laurent Philonenko, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Clients and Mobility Business demonstrates a video call using Cisco Jabber for iPad:
Cisco is also introducing a new immersive telepresence system, the Cisco TelePresence TX9000 Series. The TX9000 expands Cisco’s broad portfolio of telepresence offerings, which includes fully immersive systems, multipurpose room-based solutions, desktop and personal video solutions, and cloud-based managed offerings such as Cisco Callway, introduced in October 2011, ideal for small and medium-sized businesses looking to scale their workforce.
The TX9000 is built using a new industrial design that offers offers customers the highest level of video immersion, while reducing the bandwidth needed by 20 percent. Read More »
Both mid-sized and large enterprises know the value of employee collaboration to increase productivity and give the business a “leg up” on its competitors. As more businesses make sizeable investments into collaboration technology, it’s important for them to select products and services that not only meet their unique needs but also encompasses a comprehensive solution from the ground up that caters specifically to increasingly mobile employees.
Today, Sprint announced the availability of Sprint Complete Collaboration, a bundled service that gives customers a full UC solution that can be quickly and easily deployed over an all IP network. This Sprint solution is based on Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution which gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.
What does this mean for the end users who are increasingly on the go? It means being able to access collaboration applications from any device (smart phone, laptop, tablet -- you name it) anywhere at any time. It’s instant collaboration designed for today’s distributed enterprise; a feat that is best achieved when an organization opts to deploy a collaboration solution that -- at its foundation -- is keeping the bigger picture in mind: that these days, employee collaboration is no longer bound by “office walls.”
Sprint’s news validates the demand for a collaboration solution that allows service providers to leverage their own infrastructure to differentiate and drive fixed mobile convergence. We announced this new feature last December with new mobile features to HCS. As one of our first customers to announce availability of this feature, we are thrilled to see that the market is seeing the value of extending this feature to their subscribers. Read More »
As we kick off this year’s Enterprise Connect conference, one subject I am discussing a lot with customers is interoperability. This topic is always evolving, but our customers’ need for interoperability has remained the same. So what are the customers telling us about their interoperability requirements and concerns within unified communications and collaboration, and what is Cisco’s approach to addressing those?
What customers want:
At its heart, interoperability is about enabling the free flow of communication across boundaries – whether those boundaries are geographical, across firewalls between businesses and their ecosystems or customers. Customers want to be able to share information quickly and easily across different systems from multiple vendors.
Customers also stress the need for protecting their investments in existing systems and extending their capabilities to new types of work scenarios. These systems include infrastructure (such as Active Directory or Exchange or Notes), voice and video systems (such as Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager and TelePresence and competitive products from other vendors), and desktop or enterprise productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office, IBM Lotus, SAP, Salesforce.com and others). They must work within heterogeneous environments and accommodate new solutions as they come to market.
But that two systems work together is not enough. They must come together as seamlessly as possible to ensure an uncompromised user experience
Finally, this all needs to happen across platforms and devices, particularly as we move toward a post-PC era of many different devices -- from smartphones and tablets in the field to desktop computers and immersive room-based systems. These devices need to be blended into customers’ existing collaboration environments while providing a consistent and compelling user experience.
During a recent Desktop Virtualization Webcast titled VDI with Unified Communications: What Architects Need to Know, one of the key takeaways was that Unified Communications (UC) and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) teams need to work together and look at the larger user environment in which they are delivering the IT services. When the audience was asked how many of them were collaborating with their UC teams, 53% said they were currently engaging with their organization’s UC teams in their desktop virtualization projects.
Of course, this may be a biased sample, since the survey is of the webcast attendees, which mainly include IT professionals who are interested in the intersection of VDI and UC. However, I believe this is a sign of a growing trend in enterprise IT.
It’s that time of year again. Spring in Orlando where the industry will gather for Enterprise Connect, and the Cisco team will be there in full force.
So get ready for a whole new set of statistics demonstrating the health of our industry and the pace of change in the post-PC era. For example:
Between 2011 and 2016, mobile data traffic is expected to increase 1800%
Video traffic is expected to make up 70% of that mobile data in 2016 and more than 90% of network traffic
Cloud services, which are being accelerated by the adoption of tablets and smartphones, will drive a second wave of IT consumerization. Software as a service, which is already disrupting more than 25% of the enterprise application space, will go on to change the way we collaborate globally
(Sources: Cisco Visual Networking Index Feb 2012, “Which Software Markets Will SaaS Disrupt?” Forrester Research, January 2011)
At Enterprise Connect, we at Cisco want to hear how these changes are affecting your businesses today – and how you are planning for tomorrow. Video, cloud collaboration services, mobility, and customer collaboration are some of the themes we look forward to discussing.
I hope you will make time to see my colleague, OJ Winge, deliver the Cisco keynote on March 27th at 10am Eastern time (7am Pacific). You can also watch it live on nojitter.com.
In my last blog, I asked the question “Is Collaboration Worth It? Every day, customers tell us collaboration is critical to their ability to compete—something top of mind right now. Why does collaboration matter? From our research and interviews with business leaders, we attribute the growing importance of collaboration to three fundamental trends:
Competition comes from anywhere and everywhere. The barriers to entry are lower than ever, and you cannot predict who will enter your market next. It might be a startup in India, China, Africa or Eastern Europe—or competition from another industry. How do you stay ahead when you don’t know which organizations you’ll compete with next month or next year? Read More »
When one is fortunate enough to work on as exciting and mammoth a project as the London 2012 Games, it is easy to forget that while it might take over your life, for others it’s a distant and somewhat unattainable dream.
Certainly LOCOG are working hard to try and expand the reach of the Games beyond London and make sure other parts of the country benefit from the once-in-a-lifetime experience and opportunity the Games coming to the UK brings. The torch relay alone will ensure that 95% of the UK population will be within a one-hour journey of the Olympic Flame, and that will certainly help.
But just this week the impact we, as Olympic and Paralympic Partners can have on people’s experiences and perception of the Games, was brought very much to life via feedback we had from our partner Pearson -- who are working with Cisco on the Out of the Blocks StemNet programme. This programme was launched in January, using London 2012 as a catalyst to encourage children aged 11-14 to get excited about learning maths and science. So far over 4,000 UK secondary schools have received a set of free Key Stage 4 activity books.
Our colleague visiting a remote school in Lincolnshire was delighted to see the teachers using the Out of the Blocks books and how the children were excited not only about science and maths, but also for the Games themselves. As one teacher said: “We’re in an out-of-the-way area. The children have never seen a major event, and there aren’t any children in my class going to the Olympics – this Series brings it to life for them.”
Another said: “Endlessly kids say, ‘when am I ever going to use this Maths in my life?’ Well, this book shows you where and how… The diving lesson sticks in my mind. The kids are intrigued by the formulas – it makes them think how they’re useful in real life.”
A recent landmark study by BenchmarkPortal showed that Cisco-based contact centers have a nearly 17% lower average cost per call than contact centers not using Cisco. A medium-to-large contact center can handle millions of calls a year, so these are tremendous savings. At the same time, the study reveals that companies using Cisco-based contact centers enjoy customer satisfaction rates more than 3% greater than companies using other vendors’ technology. Given that a fraction of a percentage increase in customer satisfaction can have a major positive impact on business profits, this too showcases why Cisco is creating such a buzz in the contact center market. You can access a presentation of the study results here.
In less than ten years, Cisco has evolved from a newcomer in the customer care industry to a leading worldwide technology provider. Last summer we were recognized for the first time as the world’s leading Interactive Voice Response (IVR) vendor. Cisco is currently #2 in the worldwide contact center market, and we are driving aggressively toward number one.
Contact center is at the core of our collaboration strategy at Cisco. We are delivering innovations in Customer Collaboration, which combines traditional contact center technology with key innovations in social media, Web 2.0 agent workspaces, video, and network-based recording and analytics to empower businesses to forge deeper, proactive relationships with their customers.
Once upon a time in the days of Opie and Andy, doctors made house calls. I’ve seen it on TV, so it must be true. Now, a doctor visit usually requires that you do the visiting to a clinic, office, or hospital. An initial appointment may result in referrals for tests or to specialists – more visits, parking lots, waiting rooms. Sometimes your information gets transferred along, sometimes it doesn’t.
Mobile devices are showing up everywhere, healthcare included. There’s even a new word: mHealth. (We had e-everything in the early 2000s, then came along iSomething, so let’s now move further into the alphabet with mWords.) Read More »
Cisco’s contact center business is on a roll, as companies of all types and sizes embrace Customer Collaboration at an ever-increasing rate to forge deeper, more proactive relationships with their clients.
Today’s press release showcases three such companies-- CareCore National, Skowhegan Savings Bank, and AAA of Western and Central New York--who, although very different, are all transforming and growing their business with Customer Collaboration.
These companies highlight the widespread applicability and benefits of Customer Collaboration, which combines proven, traditional contact center technology with the power of social media, video, web 2.0 agent workspaces, and network-based recording to allow businesses to closely interact with customers in ways that were never before possible.
Each of these companies is different, with its own unique requirements for interacting with customers. But Customer Collaboration from Cisco offers something for all of them—a way for Skowhegan Savings Bank to connect with existing and prospective clients via Cisco SocialMiner and Cisco Unified Contact Center Express, a platform including Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise and Cisco MediaSense for CareCore National to deliver a better support experience for its physician clients, and an integration of Cisco Unified Contact Center Enterprise with workforce and quality management solutions for AAA of Western and Central New York to connect more efficiently with its growing customer base.
Consider me a weekend warrior of the DIY home-improvement world. My projects are likely laughable (in scope and outcome) in the eyes of the professionals, but if that’s the case, they’re not invited to my next barbeque. So there.
Granted, I sometimes experience delusions of grandeur as I envision transforming my fixer-upper into a quaint Sunset magazine-worthy before/after feature. Norm Abram will never worry about me usurping his reputation, but I like fixing things when they break and looking at something I’ve improved and knowing I did it.
I can swing a hammer and even use a tile saw, but most projects involve a lot of learning and asking questions along the way. Sometimes that’s a bit of a process – finding the answers I need or the people who have them. Read More »
