Collaboration is an inherently social concept. It’s about people and connection. It’s about communicating, working together, interacting to meet goals, accomplishing tasks, innovating, and creating. Just as people have unique personalities, so do the ways they collaborate for business, whether 1:1 or in groups, in structured meetings or hallway conversations, sitting at desks or on park benches, in real-time conversations or long-term interactions.
As technology evolves and geography becomes less relevant to connecting with others, the options for how we collaborate multiply. And multiply again. But technology itself is an enabler of collaboration, the value is in the connections that people make – with each other, information, and ideas.
Finding ways to improve the connections between people and the information they need to share is critical to improving business. From our perspective we want the technology to disappear; providing the ability for people to interact in the ways they interact best, wherever they are.
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”―Helen Keller
We see great value in providing social solutions to our customers. Bringing together social networking with communications technology provides people with the means to collaborate and gives them flexibility to do the best work they can. Like Helen Keller, we believe people working together can achieve extraordinary things. We believe the same is true of companies.
Increasingly, organizations are looking for ways to integrate social solutions into their collaboration tools and business processes. Throughout the past decade, Cisco has continued to weave social into the fabric of our own collaboration portfolio. At the same time, we continuously looked for opportunities to collaborate with other companies to integrate new technologies and improve what we can offer our customers – bringing the best of the best together to provide our customers with the ideal solution to fit their business needs.
Today I am happy to announce that we are entering a relationship with Jive Software
to deliver the best in enterprise social collaboration to our customers. By combining Jive’s enterprise collaboration platform with WebEx and Jabber, we can bring together the elements that help organizations deploy an integrated, seamless experience for their employees, customers, and partners.
What really gets me excited about the Jive and Cisco integration is that we are bringing two leading collaboration and communications technology solutions together and delivering them in a single experience for our customers – one place for employees to communicate and collaborate, one place for customers communities to foster and broaden support, and one place for partners to drive business outcomes. Together, we are helping our customers easily go between their real-time conversations, like instant messages, videoconferences and online meetings, with the more persistent social conversations, like blogs, discussions, wikis, posts and online groups.
Elisa Steele, CMO at Jive and long time friend, had a great blog post a few weeks back that discusses a shift to the new way that people want to work; a shared belief between our two companies. She said, “living this workstyle is no longer optional — it’s a business imperative to compete effectively … it integrates all the ways people work as a team to accomplish the great things they could not have otherwise achieved.”
We’re also announcing the end-of-sale of WebEx Social today. As the market for enterprise social software continues to develop, we’re seeing the market consolidate around key vendors. To provide the best flexibility and outcomes for our customers, we’re expanding our focus to work with these vendors’ products and to provide native integration with products in our collaboration portfolio. Rather than emphasize social within one product, we’re making sure it’s an integral part of all our products.
In addition, Cisco Services is expanding our Collaboration Services to plan and build social software deployments that integrate with our customers’ Cisco Collaboration systems, to deliver a seamless user experience and drive adoption. Cisco Services also offers migration services to help existing WebEx Social customers move to Jive. It’s all about helping people connect and collaborate with others, in the ways that work best for them.
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too)
those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively
have prevailed.” ― Charles Darwin
Tags: Cisco, collaboration, conferencing, jabber, JIVE, partnership, video, WebEX, WebEx Social

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