Cisco Collaboration Summit: Notes from Day 2

It was a busy day in San Francisco. OK, it’s probably always a busy day in San Francisco. But the second day of Cisco Collaboration Summit was definitely a busy one. Consultants and analysts toured centers of innovation, partners dug deeper into the announcements from Tuesday, and customers grilled executives. All in all, there was plenty of activity.

Sessions started as early as 8 a.m. and carried through the day. The day’s events closed out for the evening with a reception in the Collaboration Experience Showcase, where attendees could get their hands on the products from Cisco and some of our collaboration partners. (Oh, and there was food. There’s always plenty of food at these things.)

Customer Forum
Where yesterday’s discussions in Customer Forum focused on some of the more lofty concepts around leadership and employee engagement, today’s topics got more into the technology. Discussions dug into the business challenges they’re hoping to solve and how they’re using collaboration technology now. There were sessions on connecting with remote employees, developing strategy with end customers, and securing the collaboration environment.

Not surprisingly, the morning’s most active session was an open discussion on cloud technology in which Jonathan Rosenberg turned the tables on the attendees by asking them questions about how they use cloud –or why they don’t. The afternoon closed with an executive Q&A panel – also known as the customers’ opportunity to grill talk with Rowan Trollope and his product leadership team on the products and future directions.

Innovation Center Tours
Today’s activities for the analysts and consultants included tours of the San Francisco Innovation Center. More than another Cisco workspace, the business units and functional teams that work in the center are specifically tied to engineering projects in support of new markets and emerging technologies. Even as Cisco redesigns it workspaces across campuses, the SFIC is designed specifically to support faster paced, more collaborative, flexible, engineering-oriented teams.

Create an App Contest
In the Customer Experience Showcase area, attendees had the chance to participate in a Create-an-App contest. It was a great way to check out the API platform and the Spark for Developers capabilities – and win a prize (always a bonus). The point is really that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to use the Cisco Spark APIs. (I think I may have proved that in my Day 1 post…)

The contest was as simple as creating a room in Spark, then using built.io, Zapier, or IFTTT to create an integration with another application and the room. They’ll announce the winner at tomorrow’s closing session.