Since March 2020, the lines we once drew between where we work, where we live, and all the spaces in between have blurred forever. At Cisco, we went from having hundreds of corporate offices to over 70,000 remote offices in a matter of days, made possible through innovation in technology and collaboration tools. And I’m super proud that we have been able to help our customers and partners do the same.

In 2021 hybrid working models have continued to evolve and introduce new challenges. In many ways, hybrid work makes it more difficult to keep people connected than when everyone was in the office, or when everyone was working at home. At Webex we’re committed to helping you make those connections easier and more impactful.

This month we’re bringing to market some fantastic new devices, new features, deeper workflow integrations and making it easy for IT teams to manage end-to-end. We’re elevating hybrid work, transforming customer relationships and user experiences – with a comprehensive set of tools and the flexibility to serve your needs today and in the future.

Today we’re kicking-off our second annual WebexOne event – I hope you’ll join us to hear how customers are using Webex to thrive and our latest innovations designed to elevate your organization’s experience as we move into a new era of work.

Enabling inclusive and efficient hybrid work experiences

Webex creates consistent, easy to use and inclusive experiences to make work possible anywhere. And we’re giving users the ability to connect their way, wherever they are.

At Home. Not everyone has the luxury of a dedicated home office. For many of us, our kitchens, sofas, and guest rooms have become our workspaces. That’s why I’m really excited about the all-new Webex Desk Mini which will be available in December. It offers the full functionality of the Webex app – calling, scheduling meetings, messaging, polling, whiteboarding with colleagues, and much more – and it’s portable. It takes up about the same space as a laptop and can be used as a second display. You can learn more about it and other Webex devices here.

And Webex audio intelligence helps everyone be heard more clearly.  Optimize for my voice removes all background noise, including background speech, which is perfect for when you are working in an open or shared environment. Early next year, we’ll be introducing “optimize for all voices” – so that each person can be heard equally in group settings.

We’re also simplifying mobile calling with Webex Go. Attach your Webex Calling business line directly to your personal mobile phone, no app required, and no need to carry a separate personal mobile device.

In the Office. Hybrid work allows many of us to work in different places throughout the week, so we may not know where we’ll be working on any given day. With the Webex App’s new room scheduling capability, you can easily add a meeting room to any scheduled meeting in a few clicks. You can also see additional information about the room, including capacity, device type, location, and directions to get there. This is just one more innovation we’re delivering to ensure a safe and productive return to the office for those who do.

When we do go into the office, it will be a whole new experience. Optimizing meeting spaces and supporting creative collaboration is extremely important. The incredible new Webex Board Pro is a game changer. Available in 55-inch and 75-inch sizes, it has dual 4K cameras and two active pens…not to mention wheels, so you can roll your ideas anywhere in the office. No need to choose between a great video conferencing experience or a great whiteboarding experience. The Webex Board Pro gives you both at the same time.

You can also whiteboard anywhere, anytime, with anyone – on your phone, laptop, tablet, or Webex device, via the Webex App. With our enhanced whiteboarding capabilities, all your whiteboards are stored in one place, so you can filter, search and share.

We’re continuing to enable deeper workflow integrations everywhere to help strengthen collaborative skillsets. Soon, 60+ common business apps, like Miro and Smartsheet, will be directly embedded into the Webex app, which means you no longer need to switch between the apps you use. In just one click, you can add them to your brainstorms, meetings, and shared spaces.

Employee Well-being. People are working longer hours and burnout is a real possibility, so we’re putting a lot of emphasis on empathy and employee well-being. Personal Insights in Webex, available to all Webex customers this month, provides detailed analytics and insights to help you manage your work-life balance, carve out focus time, and build better connections.

We’re also previewing Team Insights, designed to help teams identify activity patterns, like after-hours collaboration and meeting trends, and blocks of back-to-back meetings. No private or individual information is shown, and it’s a fantastic opportunity to proactively address work trends across distributed teams.

Innovations everywhere. Sometimes scheduling or attending a meeting isn’t very practical – especially when time zones are a factor. Vidcast – our asynchronous video messaging tool – enables remote or hybrid work users to collaborate at a much faster pace by creating and sharing short video messages. We’re releasing the public beta and integrating it into Webex Suite in Spring 2022.

Seamless Interoperability. We’re committed to an open environment, and we want you to always have the best meeting experience. That is why we are offering unparalleled interoperability across third-party meeting products like Google Meet and Microsoft Teams. Next year we will be expanding that to include Zoom meetings.

Complete Network Visibility: To protect your network, you need complete visibility, including what’s happening between you and your provider’s cloud. We now have ThousandEyes agents embedded deeply into Webex data centers, giving you forward and reverse-path network path visibility in ThousandEyes. Learn more about how you can isolate and troubleshoot problems before it affects your users here.

More reach and more value for in-person, virtual, and hybrid events

We’ve completely transformed the events experience on the Webex platform to be more seamless and more engaging for both organizers and participants.  Whether you’re planning a small webinar or a large multi-day event, you can now manage each aspect of the event – from registration to analytics – all in one events portfolio, and without the complexity and cost normally associated with managing events. Slido integration, coming soon, will enable you to interact with your audience using engaging polls, quizzes, and surveys all from the same window. And we’ll soon offer fully integrated on-site attendee management.

We’re providing the world’s first end-to-end hybrid event and meeting technology suite, made possible with the integration of Socio into the Webex Suite. You can experience it yourself by joining our WebexOne event this week!

Preview the future of hybrid work

We’re also excited to preview our next-generation hybrid work solution, Webex Hologram, the industry’s first real-time collaboration solution delivering photo-realistic holograms. In active customer trials and industry previews, the feedback has been fantastic! If you want to learn more or try it out yourself click here.

“The experience was way better than avatars, more professional, personal and engaging. The Webex Hologram experience was fantastic, and I look forward to seeing how this product will change collaboration for the better.” Carolina Milanese, Creative Strategies

Watch this video to see it in action:

Reimagining customer experiences

Today, customer experience is much more than a contact center for triaging calls. It is about creating unique experiences for each customer, engaging with them where they are, using their preferred channel of communication. To create these remarkable experiences, our customers need an end-to-end, fully programmable service designed to create lifelong relationships with customers. That’s where Webex for Customer Experience comes in.

Webex for Customer Experience provides end-to-end, ready-to-use customer experience applications across logistics, commerce, experience management and marketing, with a cloud contact center. It also provides a complete infrastructure that creates common data and common APIs to stitch together all the apps and customize experiences with Webex Connect – our CPaaS infrastructure.  And you get the IMI Connect CPaaS capabilities we acquired and integrated along with additional CPaaS APIs from Webex – the world’s most adopted enterprise communications platform for hybrid work and for CX.  We’re also now exposing some of those APIs so your developers can build on top of it. Yet if you don’t have the developer resources, your technical analyst can leverage the intuitive workflow builder to quickly create and deploy customer journeys and interactions.

Cisco brings all these capabilities together in a comprehensive portfolio to help you tackle the challenges you may face in this new era of hybrid work, today and in the future. At Webex we’ve made it easy. We’ve done the work to tightly integrate software, hardware, cameras, sensors, network, AI and security – enabling hybrid work that’s powered end-to-end by Cisco. And it is extensible to the apps and devices you and your customers love. To see how all of this comes together, check out our latest blogs on Reimagining customer experiences with Webex and how Every interaction counts with enterprise CPaaS.

Be sure to join us this week for our 2nd annual WebexOne user conference October 26-28 to see these solutions in action! We’ve got an incredible line up of speakers and innovations that you won’t want to miss.

Learn more

What’s new in Webex: October 2021

Building an inclusive workforce experience with Webex

Webex’s latest milestones and innovations hit the sweet spot for hybrid work