Orchestras are often used as metaphors for all sorts of things--organizational structure, planning sessions and even families.
Have you been to the symphony recently? Musicians sit in a regimented ordering around the stage. The concertmaster sets the tune. The conductor lifts the baton. And then, with the pull of a bow across a string, or breath across a mouthpiece, the music begins. Throughout the performance, each section of the orchestra plays a specific part – either separately or together – to create a harmonized work of art.
The prestigious Czech National Orchestra, known for its versatility, lived up to its reputation during a recent performance (for a new BNP product called Hello Bank!). They put their instruments – some hundreds of years old – aside in favor of newer, more common instruments: smartphones and tablets.
Cisco Prime Collaboration (CPC) is based on years of partnership and collaboration between Cisco IT and the Cisco Network Management Technology Group (NMTG). Today CPC is a critical part of our internal video operations process, with useful capabilities like
- Proactive monitoring and alerts for video endpoint faults
- Real-time monitoring of live sessions and call session statistics reports
- End-to-end network path troubleshooting
- Endpoint and system inventory reporting
Figure 1: CPC Provides proactive monitoring of endpoints, sessions, and ports.
Video calls and TelePresence meetings in Cisco IT have become part of the Cisco global business culture. Utilization of video is high (for example, utilization of the shared 3-screen TelePresence systems has remained at about 68% for the past few years). One reason for this success is that, at Cisco, these critical video sessions run smoothly, without disruptions or noticeable drops in video or audio quality. High availability and high quality is essential for user adoption of video: all the components (endpoints, network infrastructure, backend systems and etc.) need to run smoothly without causing any frustration for users and distracting them from the communication effectively of the meeting. These disruptions are particularly unacceptable for high visibility events or sessions that involve executives and customers. Cisco IT uses CPC to keep video running smoothly when it really counts.
Peanut butter and jelly. Sonny and Cher. Ying and yang. Can you think of other things that go together so well? I couldn’t until March’s Enterprise Connect when we announced that Cisco TelePresence and WebEx were uniting to deliver voice, two-way HD video and content sharing to any employee.
Why is this significant?With tens of thousands of Cisco TelePresence endpoints and more than 30 million active WebEx users, we wanted to make B2B video collaboration easier than ever. By combining our market leading Web conference solution, WebEx, with the market leading enterprise high-quality video capabilities in our telepresence solutions we are enabling a seamless meeting with anyone, anywhere, on any device.
Optimized to work with any standards-based video endpoints, Cisco TelePresence and WebEx helps organizations broaden the reach of video collaboration and simplify the experience for all participants.
What can our customers expect by bringing together these two powerful collaboration tools?
Over the past decade, I’ve worked on a number of different projects aimed at improving communications using video conferencing and telepresence. In that time, I’ve been fortunate to be involved with key innovations at first Tandberg then Cisco that have had great impact on video collaboration:
Forging life-like experience with immersive telepresence
Extending the power of in-person all the way to the desktop
Enabling a consistent and intuitive user experience with a revolutionary touch-enabled device
Playing a pivotal role in driving video formats like H.264 and H.265 to standardization
Growing the video calling circle beyond the enterprise with technological advancements like software video clients, cloud deployment models and firewall traversal that enable cost-effective B2B and B2C calling
With the spirit of innovation ingrained in both company’s DNA, the merger of Tandberg and Cisco’s video businesses in 2010 proved to be a major win for the industry and for the customer. Since then, we’ve focused our efforts on delivering next-generation video collaboration solutions that are enabling organizations to collaborate easily and efficiently, and allowing them to foster innovation within their own businesses.
Why is all of this so important? As time marches on, we see video becoming pervasive. Roberto De La Mora recently called video a business imperative, not a nice-to-have, and shared the five steps to success for deploying a business video strategy. The key to helping our customers prepare for the pervasive video future is through a flexible, scalable and interoperable approach. And others agree…
The wealth management industry is under transformation. In an effort to win back trust, attract new customers and retain existing ones, firms are investing in new collaborative technologies that support their business model transformation from transactions to interactions focused on client centricity. Various McKinsey research and studies have shown that those who adopt more client-centric tools and processes can increase revenues up to 20 percent and profitability up to 2.5 times. Cisco’s own research has shown that wealth management firms that adopt client centric tools such as video can reduce client attrition, especially for the critical under-55 segment. Part of this transformation involves investing in video capabilities that enable firms and their experts to touch more customers, more often and in a more intimate manner than voice and email do today.
Getting the right expert to the right customer, at the right time is crucial in being able to offer superior customer service and improve cross-sell and up-sell rates. Another critical, competitive differentiator is embedding video capabilities into the mobile channels and applications customers already use. Read More »
