Imagine you’re a professional hockey coach. You wouldn’t give your players a mix of football, cricket, and badminton equipment and send them out on the ice. You’d make sure your team had the best gear available so the players can focus on scoring points, not figuring out how to use a cricket bat to manage the puck.
In your own business arena, you want to make sure you’re outfitting your teams with the technology that lets them do their best work. When people have the right gear, the tools get out of the way so that the players can play.
There’s growing interest in the league of collaboration technology, especially when it comes to optimizing work among teams. New and long-established vendors alike are focusing on teams, the workspaces they use, and how they communicate. That’s why we have the Cisco Spark platform.
Cisco has twice the share of any competitor in video and web conferencing.
It’s not new territory for us. We have all the positions covered, from telephony to video conferencing to messaging and team workspaces. And we have them covered well. Cisco has twice the share of any competitor in video and web conferencing. And industry experts agree. Gartner positions Cisco as a leader in all five Magic Quadrants focused on collaboration. Going back to the sports theme – that’s an all-star lineup.
The Cisco Collaboration Difference
Successful teamwork depends on connections. Your teams should be able to connect in the ways they need, wherever they are. The right tools matter. That’s one big advantage of Cisco Collaboration solutions.
Our market-leading voice and video calling and meetings capabilities, combined with our award-winning device portfolio, are tightly integrated. That means you get the best and most seamless user experience in the market — from mobile to desk to meeting room.
Quality and reliability: Product and service quality and reliability are a big part of why Cisco holds the #1 market share for telephony and enterprise video. One example: Delivering Cisco WebEx on a global network purpose-built for real-time voice and video ensures speed and performance. Participants join via the WebEx data center closest to them. Shared content comes up instantly and this approach helps ensure high-quality video no matter where attendees are.
From desktop phones and software clients to a deep roster of video systems, Cisco systems have been a major destination for organizations moving away from PBX systems and broadening their collaboration capabilities. In fact, 95% of Fortune 500 companies are using video-enabled Cisco Collaboration solutions.
Flexible, integrated offerings: Keep things simple for your teams – and the teams that manage the tools they use. Cisco’s broad portfolio provides you with choice. Flexible deployment options mean you can deploy calling on-premises while still leveraging cloud for meetings and messaging and using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Integrations and interoperability mean you don’t have to force-fit pieces or migrate to new tools and devices to support something new. Protect your investments by working with what you have, whether that is a legacy PBX, Microsoft or Google calendar, third-party video systems, or otherwise.
Keep things simple for your teams – and the teams that manage the tools they use.
Cisco Spark brings all your work, messaging, and meetings together in one app. And the Cisco Spark Board combines video conferencing, content sharing, and whiteboarding in a single device. Integration with the app means attendees can take part in a meeting or real-time whiteboard session wherever they are, including annotating and contributing to shared drawings.
Unique hybrid architecture: Integrate existing assets with Cisco Spark to protect your investments and provide users with new innovative experiences. Simplify teamwork with instant desktop sharing, directory integration, and the simplest meeting scheduling solution on the market. With Hybrid Media Service you can bring the benefits of cloud and on-premises together for Cisco Spark meetings. By deploying a local instance of Cisco Spark meeting on your network, you get the video quality of on-prem meetings with the simplicity, flexibility, and rapid iteration of new functionality of cloud apps.
The easiest access on the market – for everyone: Even if most of your meetings are internal to your organization, you still need connections to the outside world. Employees need to meet with customers, partners, suppliers, and other people. But a lot of solutions make it difficult to bring “outsiders” in. External participants in Cisco Spark have a simple join experience via a browser or through the free app – no downloads required. Unlike other solutions, we integrate with your directory of choice: There’s no need to have a guest account or separate login for each company with which you message or meet. Because your Cisco Spark account is based around your email address, you can see all your interactions in one place, including those with people in other organizations – or your school, or your mom.
Security: Cisco also is the market leader for security. We use this expertise to drive the most secure experiences across the collaboration portfolio. Cisco Spark’s industry-leading end-to-end encryption ensures all messages, files, and whiteboards remain secure at all times, while still enabling value-add features like search. This is especially important when collaborating with people outside your organization. The encryption and policy architecture allow these users to encrypt and decrypt messages and content with keys that Cisco never sees or holds. Each company can exert its own policy upon its users in shared multi-company space. Our Key Management Server, end-to-end encryption, and policy architecture are unique in this regard.
Cisco Spark’s industry-leading end-to-end encryption ensures all messages, files, and whiteboards remain secure at all times,
Continuous innovation: Our engineers don’t sit still. They continue to innovate with a primary goal of simplifying the experience. We have a strong product offering for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid available today. And we have a robust roadmap designed to provide you with even more flexibility. The platform approach is a key aspect to achieve ongoing evolution. One architecture supports all collaboration workloads, delivers consistent experiences, and provide a basis for you to grow and extend to the cloud (when you’re ready).
Simplified purchasing: Keeping things simple, the Cisco Spark Flex Plan lets you get cloud, on-premises, and hosted collaboration in one user-based subscription, and mix and match between services as your business evolves.
The best team solutions mean you can work with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Consider some of the most basic risks of choosing the wrong tool – reduced productivity, security risks, limited scalability, user dissatisfaction, complex management, your organization’s reputation… Let your competitors send out their teams with cricket bats and badminton birdies. We’ll see who wins in the end.
See why Cisco continues to be recognized for meeting solutions. Download Gartner reports.
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