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Secure, Intelligent Collaboration For All

Secure, Intelligent Collaboration For All

Jan 27, 2020 — Sri Srinivasan

This is an exciting time for you, your employees and your customers. Our digital world moves quickly, and no one wants to miss out on anything. The workforce and workplace are evolving, mandating changes in how and where employees work. That’s why Cisco Collaboration is laser-focused on innovating the future of work.

In a recent survey, Webex users identified the top four capabilities they believe will enable more productive collaboration.

From smart rooms to virtual assistants, our customers are saying they want intelligent collaboration that fits their workstyles and workflow. We’re on it! At Cisco Live Barcelona this week, we’re making announcements to help businesses of all sizes transform to a more modern workplace where agile teams can be more engaged and more productive — securely.

Voice Intelligence for More Productive and Efficient Meetings

Think about the time we spend in meetings each week. Think about the amount of information that’s exchanged during those conversations, the tasks assigned. A study found that enterprises spend approximately $37 billion a year in unproductive meetings. It’s no shock that meetings could be better – more personal, more productive.

Cisco Webex is making furtive notetaking, lost action items, and lengthy meeting summaries a thing of the past. We are helping organizations set new standards for productive and actionable meetings by turning talk into action.

We’re expanding the natural language processing and AI Cisco Webex already has in the portfolio to modernize meeting experiences and beyond. Extending this powerful voice intelligence engine, which combines transcription and conversational AI, across the Webex platform unlocks the power of collaboration in business conversations and meetings to more users and across workflows.

Could your employees be more productive with a personal assistant? Let me introduce you to Cisco Webex Assistant for Webex Meetings – the first virtual in-meeting assistant for the enterprise. Webex Assistant understands voice commands, provides closed captioning, transcribes meetings, takes notes, highlights the most important comments for easy and quick reference, and introduces powerful post-meeting capabilities. After the meeting – view and edit notes and share action items and highlights with team members.

These innovations mean meeting attendees can be more focused and engaged in the discussion, not on the technology or in taking notes. Great ideas and action items are not lost. Even non-attendees can quickly gather the most relevant information from these digital notes and insights, turning a block of text into a trove of insightful information that can be used across relevant workflows.

Turning talk into action means teams can be more productive and organizations can multiply the value of every interaction. At CiscoLive Barcelona, we are showcasing how Webex Assistant will transform user experiences before, during and after meetings …wherever you work. Watch the live-stream of my keynote demonstration to see how the Webex Assistant changes the game for global teams everywhere.

Secure Cross-Organization, Cross-Border Collaboration

Today business is global and agile teams reach across regions and even outside company borders with cross-company collaboration. That means workplace collaboration is increasingly occurring beyond the traditional network boundaries.

But, ensuring enterprise security and compliance while delivering solutions that are easy for users can be challenging. Consider how enterprises must comply with regulatory requirements including GDPR and even California’s recently passed Consumer Privacy Act. These are just two examples of a growing set of regional requirements that global businesses must meet or face significant fines.

Cisco Collaboration delivers solutions that are built with enterprise-class security and global collaboration in mind. This is foundational for our cloud solutions and Cisco Webex has a 360-degree approach to privacy, security, and compliance – with true end-to-end encryption. Now we’re adding additional data residency options for Webex Teams solutions. Expanded data center resources in the US and EMEA host Webex Teams customers’ identity information, encryption keys, and content- including user-generated messages, files, and whiteboards as well as metadata like search and messaging analytics. This approach addresses data locality needs without compromising the global collaboration needs of our customers.

This means that enterprise administrators can choose where user content is maintained, and collaboration services are closer to end-users – reducing latency and improving the end-user experience. European and multinational organizations will be able to meet data residency needs in-region based on employee location for authentication and user personally identifiable information (PII), content storage, and local encryption keys to meet company policy and simplify experiences for users.

Our approach to data residency provides a single global identity authorization with local personally identifiable information (PII), local encryption keys, and content storage. Webex Teams services are federated across data centers which means you don’t need guest accounts to collaborate across borders – or even across companies. Users can continue to collaborate (message, meet, call, and co-create) with anyone across the globe using a single global identity and their experience is unaffected by the location of individuals’ data storage. This addresses data residency needs without compromising global collaboration needs.

This security is part of the Webex single platform advantage – an enterprise-grade solution with a single conversational thread, data residency, and end-to-end security – delivering collaboration without compromise.

Modern Workplaces for Businesses of All Sizes

Cisco Webex supports modern workplace experiences for organizations large and small. Soon, small to medium businesses will have access to the same quality of video devices, at an affordable, entry-level price, that their larger counterparts use. Cisco Collaboration is making this possible with the new Cisco Webex Room USB.

Webex Room USB enables a premium video experience that is easy to use, easy to deploy, manage, and scale with centralized management when connected to Webex. Employees or their guests simply connect their laptop to the Webex Room USB and join any meeting from any client. When not in use for a video call, Webex Room USB can be used for digital signage to turn open spaces into your company news source.

Cisco is taking advantage of our hardware and software approach to offer smaller organizations options to maximize productivity in the huddle and shared spaces with an easy upgrade path to our intelligent Webex Room Kit Mini room system as their business grows.

Looking for improved productivity with virtual assistants, smart meeting rooms or workflow integrations? Cisco Webex has you covered. Today’s announcements are just the start of this new future of work. We are listening and working together to continuously deliver the leading-edge simple experiences for your employees.