The Webex Platform – limitless collaboration and beyond

Hybrid work trends have rapidly evolved over the past year, changing the way organizations think about hybrid collaboration. After optimizing for remote work, they are looking to bring the best of work-from-home and work-in-the-office together to enhance employee productivity and provide the most versatile collaboration tools to attract and retain the best talent.

These trends point to the fact that hybrid work is no longer a choice, but a requirement for organizations that know they need to provide consistent technology from any location – for employees who have ever-increasing expectations. To fulfill on this takes more than a collaboration service. It takes a platform approach that goes beyond addressing individual collaboration workloads, managed in specific locations, and instead relies on the power of technology capable of delivering seamless experiences everywhere.

The Webex platform does this, not only addressing where employees work, but also how they want to work. And it does it in a secure, easy-to-manage way – all while extending its benefits to futureproof our customers’ investment and meet the emerging needs of a hybrid world.

The Webex Platform offers security that enables “work-from-anywhere.”

When it comes to enabling hybrid work, security is the top priority. It’s essential to make sure employees can work from anywhere safely, protecting user information and IP when employees are in meetings, on calls and using messaging from any device. The Webex platform is agile and secure, offering end-users the ability to collaborate from home or the office with the same level of flexibility that they’ve grown accustomed to from their smart phones and apps.

For meetings that involve highly sensitive information, Webex offers protection with end-to-end encryption and participant authentication. But what happens if an invited guest is the source of a leak? Webex will soon offer audio watermarking so you can easily trace the source of prohibited recordings – right from within Webex Control Hub. When a host enables audio watermarking, meetings are embedded with unique identifiers that will help you identify the meeting, participant and device. When you know the source of the leak, you can prevent future incidents and protect your organization’s most confidential information.

Webex by Cisco has a distinct security advantage. Our customers benefit from Cisco’s security and trust management, frameworks, and integrations with the Cisco security and compliance portfolio. For example, the Webex Extended Security Pack includes data loss prevention through Cisco Cloudlock and anti-malware scans with Cisco Talos. We’ve now added Cisco Duo Multifactor Authentication (MFA) to the bundle. With Duo, customers can keep data safe by utilizing single sign-on (SSO) and MFA for Webex to verify user trust quickly and securely in every access attempt. This helps not only improve end user productivity and experience but also enterprise security and risk posture while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Webex customers realize tremendous benefits from working with Cisco as their single vendor across collaboration security and compliance, but we also offer public APIs used by dozens of security and compliance partners. In fact, we have one of the largest ecosystems of security partners in the industry, so customers have the option to integrate their existing security and compliance vendors with Webex with ease.

The Webex Platform provides APIs and an ecosystem that maximizes worker productivity.

When baseline security is met, organizations can focus on achieving the same level of productivity from any location with seamless workflows. Webex’s highly extensible platform and ecosystem support this in a variety of ways, helping knowledge workers, frontline workers, sales representatives, and service agents avoid context switching and save time.

We’ve invested heavily into building core capabilities like embedded apps that make it easy for users to find and bring third party integrations into Webex meetings, messaging spaces and calls, while also giving IT admins control over the apps they enable to specific user groups. The benefits of the Webex Embedded Apps Framework extend to the Cisco Desk series for remote work, and to the Cisco Board series, ensuring productivity isn’t lost when users are back in the office and collaborating from conference rooms.

Some of our newest embedded apps include Avoma AI meeting assistant, FileOrbis for file sharing, NexGen Virtual Office to virtually represent physical buildings, Tasks by Workast for task management, and Ving Room for meeting room connectivity. All of our embedded apps can be found on the Webex App Hub, along with hundreds of other Webex integrations, including new additions Vimeo for recorded meeting management, Caller ID Reputation for outbound calling health scores, CoreyHealth Workflow for Providers that offers telehealth information, and Mister CA Metrics for billing and analytics calling reports. New bots include Ving Room bot, Vizir HR for employee HR support and Yoxel Signals to deliver workflows from CRM systems and more.

With Webex embedded apps users can customize the collaboration experience within Webex. Webex also offers the ability to take Webex Meetings, Messaging or Calling and embed that functionality in a widget used in other SaaS workflow applications, such as SalesForce or ServiceNow. We offer public, open APIs so the Webex experience can be customized in whatever ways our customers need. Many use our APIs to create bespoke integrations that work with their systems to cut down on manual processes, improve customer response times and manage cross-platform communication in a single pane of glass.

And the benefits of our APIs don’t stop at collaboration. The Webex Contact Center includes off-the-shelf integrations with leading business process systems, like Salesforce and Tableau, but our APIs can take productivity to the next level, enabling customization of the agent desktop, routing, automation, AI capabilities, and much more.

The Webex Platform is managed using a powerful tool that makes hybrid easy.

The Webex platform makes hybrid collaboration management easy with Control Hub – a single touchpoint for deploying, managing adoption and troubleshooting collaboration in real time across multiple locations. Control Hub offers a variety of capabilities to improve total cost of ownership and ensure customers get the most from Webex quickly.

Deploying and managing users can be time consuming and error prone. New automated license assignments and setting templates help IT admins provision users with the right licenses and configure the right policies extremely quickly – in a matter of minutes for thousands of users.

Coming soon – Control Hub as a Coach offers IT admins an in-product digital coach that takes the complexity out of improving hybrid work experiences. Admins set goals, such as to improve the organization’s security posture or increase adoption of collaboration tools, and Control Hub provides continuous support by suggesting actionable insights and step-by-step guidance. With a new dashboard that keeps targets front and center, IT admins are sure to achieve all their hybrid goals in no time.

Futureproof your investment with cross-portfolio advantages.

The Webex platform offers business continuity through global presence, innovation, and the ability to manage all hybrid work needs through one vendor.

Our global presence ensures that organizations can meet privacy and compliance requirements from anywhere. We are the first collaboration provider to effectively address the demand for data residency within the EU with full data residency capabilities. We also offer data residency options for meetings data in Canada and recently launched a data center in India to improve service and plan for additional data centers around the globe.

Our platform approach means new innovation capabilities added to the core show up across the Webex platform. For example, our industry-leading background noise removal initially introduced in Webex Meetings is now available in Webex Calling, Webex Contact Center and on Cisco devices to provide superior audio experience for employees and agents working from anywhere.

But we know that hybrid work technologies extend beyond just collaboration software. Core hybrid work enabling technologies also include networking and security. Cisco is the only vendor that can bring it all together with the Webex Suite, Duo, Umbrella, AnyConnect, Secure Endpoint Advantage, ThousandEyes, and Meraki. Our new hybrid work bundle gives customers access to Cisco networking, security and collaboration solutions at an affordable cost. Additionally, we offer work-from-home and work-from-office bundles that include Cisco devices with other Cisco hardware and software products.

When it comes to providing the best hybrid experience available – in a way that is easy to secure and manage – the Webex Platform offers value that only increases over time. Our customers can improve their total cost of ownership and scale with support from one vendor with the ability to cover all needs.

To get more details on the benefits of our platform approach, watch our WebexOne 2022 session titled Build a Limitless Collaboration Ecosystem, available to anyone who registered for the event.

Learn More

• What’s New with Webex Security: October 2022
• Webex customers have more control of their privacy and security
• Webex Calling at the heart of hybrid collaboration