People don’t want to be forced back into a lousy office. During the last few years, employees learned to use video effectively from home. Now, they expect and demand a better meetings and video experience in the office. If the office doesn’t meet expectations, employees aren’t happy to come back. That is why, organizations need to provide a way better experience than employees have at home with video in every meeting room! This is part of what can enable your office to be a magnet, not a mandate. In a CIO survey by Morgan Stanley, executives placed in-office investments such as video-enabling conference rooms and refreshing existing video in their top priorities.
What worked before to put video in only a few rooms, will no longer work today now that the majority of your meeting rooms need to be updated with video. As organizations look to video-enabled conference rooms at scale, they need to do things differently, think differently. Businesses need streamlined deployment, manageability, and simplicity for both the end user and IT organization. Cisco can not only help reduce complexity and cost, but we can also deliver the best possible meeting experience for all users – here’s how!
Reduce Complexity & Cost – Let Cisco Work its Magic
Today, we see a lot of conference rooms that aren’t video-enabled, or have meeting rooms that are complex to operate with multiple vendors, third-party equipment, and ongoing support costs – making it expensive and difficult to manage.
The traditional mindset for designing video conference rooms in the past included several additional components such as:
- Digital Signage Processor for multiple microphones
- Control processor for controlling cameras, lighting, displays, etc.
- Control panel UI for placing calls, dimming lights, closing shades, and more
- Switcher to switch cameras and table inputs
- Separate devices to provide wireless sharing
- Environmental Sensors for temperature, humidity, etc.
Phew, that was a lot – and not to mention, a video device and the displays themselves too!
It’s no surprise that customers relied on third parties for support and paid an arm and a leg to make sure it was running. When you have a bad meeting experience, who do you call and what do you do? This barely worked when you were video-enabling a small portion of your conference rooms, and it clearly will not work when deploying video at scale.
The power of Cisco’s video devices enables much simpler deployments. Now, many of the additional processing components mentioned above are built into our Cisco video devices and room peripherals such as Cisco’s Navigator, Camera, and Table Microphone Pro. By eliminating multiple pieces of technology in the conference room, Cisco makes it easier to troubleshoot issues, manage devices at scale and provide a single consistent UX across all rooms, all while reducing the total cost of initial purchase, deployment, and ongoing support.
With Cisco, you can get the benefits of “simple” with the capabilities of “complex” into a single solution, by integrating more rooms with one device rather than relying on multiple, different technologies from several companies. And by the way, for that 10% of rooms that require specialized designs to meet unique use cases, our core products are based on an open RoomOS platform to give customers complete access to APIs and macros for a customizable experience!
AV Meets AI – Delivering the best experience possible
Remember the goal is to provide a better meeting experience in the office than users get at home. Studies show 98% of meetings will have at least one remote participant. Now, with the mix of in office and at home workers, it is critical that everyone has an equal seat at the table. Video device hardware plays a large role in this, but so does the intelligent software that is supported through the hardware. Cisco Video Devices powered by RoomOS pull together thoughtful video and audio AI that delivers the best experience possible.
Image Caption: Cinematic Meetings in action!
Recently announced at Enterprise Connect, Cinematic Meetings is the perfect example of how Cisco uses its audio and video intelligence to build products and features with every user and IT administrator in mind. Cinematic Meetings is a curated collection of features that includes Frames, Speaker Track, Meeting Zones, Cross-View, and more providing users with the best view of any meeting participant at any moment. The Table Microphone Pro detects the location of the audio source and provides this information to our AI to make intelligent decisions about which camera to leverage for automatic framing of the people in the room. The audio intelligence combined with our front quad camera and the two side cameras seamlessly picks the best view of every participant in the room. The best part – this all happens automatically, no stress!
Protect your investment – Trust in Cisco
As you video enable a majority of your rooms, it is critical to ensure your video device purchases have longevity. You don’t want to be doing a refresh every 2 to 3 years like you do with a PC based device – which you’ll probably have to do if you want a decent experience. Cisco has been the market leader in video for a long time, and we have a proven track record of investment protection with our solutions. We recently refreshed our entire video portfolio so you can feel confident that you have the best video solution that won’t need to be refreshed for the next 5, 6, or 7 years.
We provide a video meeting room experience that no one else in the industry can. What others are talking about as vision, particularly around AI, we have already delivered to our customers. Businesses should take advantage of the power of Cisco Video Devices because it’s a no-brainer – reduces complexity and cost, great experience, easy to install, and manage at scale. And by the way, this meeting experience will be provided no matter which meeting solution you have – we have interoperability with Zoom, Google, and certified devices for Microsoft Teams.
Want to Learn More?
Register here to attend Don’t Overengineer Your Meeting Room, a live webinar on September 27th with Chris Barwick, VP of Collaboration GTM & Devices Acceleration.
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