Hybrid work: From stopgap response to durable strategy
This week, influential industry analyst firm Aragon Research published its fifth annual Research Globe™ for Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC), and we’re proud that Cisco was once again identified as a leader.
Aragon’s report provides a wealth of actionable insights that can help enterprise decision makers chart a UCC strategy that’s best suited for their needs. I’ll point out a few highlights but will encourage everyone to read the full report.
Key to hybrid work: Integrated collaboration experience
Aragon makes a strong argument that in a world of hybrid work, team collaboration tools will now be central and consolidate much of employees’ communications and workflows. Team collaboration tools are becoming the primary environment for individual and group communications and is in fact emerging as an alternative to email for getting work done.
With such central role in employees’ daily workflow, to be truly effective, collaboration tools must integrate voice, video, meetings, messaging and sharing into a single seamless user experience.
Aragon noted our continued dedication to innovation and significant progress we’ve made with Webex over the past year saying:
“Cisco released a completely new Webex App experience that allows people to focus on work with seamless calling, messaging, meetings and team collaboration, all in a single app experience.”
Aragon further notes the value of our integrated Webex Contact Center and collaboration device portfolio. Webex Contact center is a complete cloud contact center solution that is integrated with the Webex collaboration suite to improve contact center employees’ effectiveness and customer satisfaction We also offer full range of purpose-built collaboration devices which are fully integrated within the Webex user and service management experience.
There have been many more enhancements to the integrated Webex user experience over the past year, including full calling integration and service management consolidation in Control Hub which Aragon details further in the report.
The rise of Collaboration intelligence
With so much of users’ time spent interacting within a team collaboration environment, overall productivity and even employee wellbeing are at stake. It is essential for collaboration platforms to provide intelligence that reduces complexity, distractions and fatigue, while enhancing accessibility for all.
The best answer to the challenge of creating truly user-centric collaboration is to leverage technologies such as AI, speech recognition, image understanding, noise cancellation and automation to eliminate mundane tasks and enhance user wellbeing.
Aragon acknowledges the extensive intelligence capabilities delivered by Webex:
“One of the highlights that works across the Cisco UC&C Platform is the new Webex Assistant, which can take notes and assign action items. Combined with people insights from Webex, gesture recognition, built-in noise reduction, new secure ways of joining meetings, better audio and video quality, and real-time translation support for more than 100 languages, it is a different Webex offering than it was at the beginning of 2020.”
And while we understand that richer functionality and increased workflow integration can also lead to increased complexity, we are committed to a continued focus on simplicity as we maintain and grow our leadership in collaboration intelligence.
Building a durable strategy
Faced with unprecedented disruption over the past 18 months, enterprises and users responded by quickly assembling whatever collaborations tools were readily available to maintain business continuity and team communication.
But now – with hybrid work emerging as the long-term reality – it is essential to build a durable long term enterprise collaboration strategy with a fully integrated experience.
Aragon’s Principal Analyst Jim Lundy says:
“Due to demand and necessity, many enterprises use multiple stand-alone UC&C applications. Now they are looking to settle for one UC&C provider to benefit from a fully integrated collaboration experience”
These upcoming decisions will have significant long-term impact on business productivity, agility and employee and customer satisfaction.
The past year has been transformative for collaboration and in response the pace of Webex innovation has also been unprecedented – delivering over 700 enhancements in just the last 8 months. We remain committed to an aggressive roadmap and to continuing to provide the absolute best collaboration experience for our customers.
Read Aragon’s full report to help you build the strategy that best meets your individual needs.
Learn more
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Aragon Research Disclaimer: Aragon Research does not endorse vendors, or their products or services that are referenced in its research publications, and does not advise users to select those vendors that are rated the highest. Aragon Research publications consist of the opinions of Aragon Research and Advisory Services organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Aragon Research provides its research publications and the information contained in them “AS IS,” without warranty of any kind.
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