Jonathan Rosenberg

Cisco is investing more today in integration with Microsoft technologies than we have ever done before. Our philosophy has always been that we will support customers that want a mixed-vendor environment.

For 20 years, the holy grail of IP communications was to enable any-to-any communications. Now, universal federation brings any-to-any communications to the workplace with effective security and policy capabilities.

Exceptional user experiences happen at the intersection of design and technical innovation. Voice tracking, space binding, and wireless sharing are examples of the innovation of the award-winning Cisco Spark Board.

The IETF has been the birthplace of countless technologies – like SIP – that have made the Internet what it is today. Standards like SIP are hugely important to Cisco, our collaboration products, and to our newest platform, Cisco Spark. And although we may be in the “post standards era,” there are many areas where application-layer standards like SIP remain essential even as IP communications moves to cloud.

For the past few months, I’ve been using Cisco Spark to manage the projects that my team is undertaking. As CTO in the Cisco Collaboration Technology Group, you can imagine we have some big projects to track. This has worked really, really well. It provides me a single place I can go to see all of my team’s initiatives in a single list. In the past, that list would be in a spreadsheet or a slide on my desktop, and I’d have to hunt for it. Now, with Cisco Spark it’s easy to find.

When we started working on the Cisco Spark Board over a year ago, we looked at what makes a regular analog whiteboard so effective. One thing we identified is that anyone can use it. You can walk into any conference room, walk up to a whiteboard, and use it. The whiteboard is there, it’s easy to use, and easy to make your own. But recent digital whiteboard attempts by others have failed to meet the same standard for ease of use. We knew we had to do better.

You walk into a conference room, and you have a simple task – project your laptop screen onto the screen at the end of the conference room. Yet, until now, this simple task has been really hard. It’s time for this cable to meet its end. Today, we’ve shipped an update to Cisco Spark that will once and for all end the evil tyranny of the conference-room projection cable.

With the release of iOS 10, the Apple and Cisco partnership comes to fruition. iOS 10 allows apps like Cisco Spark to be built to take full advantage of the features in iOS 10. Ultimately, the goal of this integration is to allow users to keep using the iPhone the way they are used to using it – but have the actual calls handled by Cisco Spark. This delivers the best of both worlds.

With today’s announcements at Apple's WWDC, we've taken a huge step forward in delivering that capability to end users and IT departments. So let’s get real, what did we announce? The Cisco Spark app will leverage new iOS 10 features and APIs to deliver seamless voice and video calling.