New innovations for the future-of-meetings

On By Snorre Kjesbu4 Min Read
Office Space With Webex Room Bar Pro Present And Being Used To Video Conference Additional Employees

Introducing the Room Bar Pro and an all-new device management experience.

AI is a buzzword. And for good reason. AI will play an important role in the future of collaboration. It’s a tool that can solve the biggest challenges of workplace collaboration: challenges like meeting equity, language barriers, meeting fatigue… the list goes on. At Cisco, our focus has always been on the experience of our customers. So, our AI innovations are purpose-built into our RoomOS platform to provide the best collaboration experiences across a spectrum of workspaces.

Recently, we announced cinematic meetings, which gives you the best view of any meeting at any moment. Just like a movie director transitions between shots and scenes- RoomOS will dynamically change the view of your meeting to fit the right need at any moment.

Introducing the Room Bar Pro

As our sector continues to innovate ever-advancing experiences for the future-of-meetings, organizations need powerful technology that can support it– today and tomorrow. Simultaneously, organizations need technologies that can be mass deployed, so that intelligent experiences can be scaled to every conference room, not just the boardroom.

We are happy to announce the Room Bar Pro, an easy-to-deploy video bar with significant processing power, more connections, touch screen integration, and all of the advanced AI capabilities built into our RoomOS platform. Based on the powerful NVIDIA processor, it has all the power you need to support tomorrow’s meeting advancements- and it’s intuitive to use, easy to deploy and simple to manage.

“It’s all the power you need to support tomorrow’s meeting advancements- and it’s intuitive to use, easy to deploy and simple to manage.”

The Room Bar Pro is optimized for medium workspaces (5-12 seats) of varying shapes. This is due to a dual camera system that reaches further, wider, and frames everyone in the room in ultra-high quality, even when participants are sitting at the ends of the table. For good reason: we asked facilities experts about their top workspace priorities, and 73% say that they are most likely to video-enable medium spaces in the next 3 years. With the Room Bar Pro, Cisco is uniquely positioned to provide the most powerful processor in a collaboration device, deployable across our customers’ workspace environments.

Cisco and Microsoft partner to bring our customers more choice

Our vision at Cisco has always been to uplevel hybrid work for every person, regardless of where or how they work. To support our customers varied workstyles and use of multiple meeting platforms, we announced that Cisco devices will support a native Microsoft Teams Rooms experience. Today, we have a range of certified devices for Microsoft Teams Rooms. With this milestone, IT teams can confidently deploy this experience across a range of meeting room and desktop workspaces.

Powered by RoomOS, customers choosing to deploy a native Microsoft Teams Rooms experience will benefit from the added capabilities of our built-in audio and video intelligence, like noise removal and Frames. Customers can join Teams and fully-featured Webex meetings with the same join experience across both platforms. And, all certified devices will be manageable in the Teams Admin Center and Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal, as well as through the Cisco Control Hub device management.

An All-New Device Management Experience

If you’ve ever walked into a meeting room to start a meeting and discovered a camera is offline or display is not functioning… you’re not alone. In today’s hybrid world, organizations need to video enable their workspaces to account for remote meeting participants. And with additional technology, IT teams experience additional management lift. With global HQ’s and hundreds of workspaces, the old-fashioned “walk-the-floor” is not feasible for many enterprises. IT teams require centralized access to workspace insights from wherever they are.

Today, I’m happy to share with you our brand-new device management experience in Control Hub. With a birds-eye view of your workspaces and powerful filtering, this “out-of-the-box” solution gives IT teams a real-time aggregate view of their workspaces. From this view, admins can see the Cisco devices and partner peripherals in each room, the health of their connections, and at-a-glance usage and environmental statistics like room temperature and humidity. This new experience will become generally available this September. 

Webex Control Hub Workspaces List The Webex Room Bar Pro Device Listed

These usage statistics and workspace insights help our customers make informed decisions about their workspace deployments. IT Teams can understand which are the most popular; which rooms are sized just right or overcrowded. You can see which are used for scheduled, versus ad-hoc meetings. And coming soon, new ThousandEyes vantage points on RoomOS devices will allow IT teams to rapidly identify and resolve issues with calls and meetings by visualizing the full network path of those services—all via easy activation through Control Hub.

Related:

More from Webex at Cisco Live 2023:

About The Author

Snorre Kjesbu
Snorre Kjesbu Vice President & General Manager Cisco
Snorre Kjesbu is Senior Vice President & General Manager of Webex Devices at Cisco.
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