Category: videoconferencing

  • The Everchanging Face Of Webex Supports Cisco’s Growth

    Javed Khan

    Three years ago, many people would’ve written of Webex as a languishing asset in Cisco’s portfolio. After all, how sexy is collaboration? How much growth is there in the market? IDC’s research said the worldwide Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) market grew 29.2% year over year from 2020 to 2021. Meanwhile, Reportlinker estimates the global enterprise collaboration market size will grow from USD 47.2 billion in 2021 to USD 85.8 billion by 2026, representing a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.7%.

    Clearly, collaboration tools are the foundation for work, education, and even our personal lives. You only need to witness the addition of emojis as a way of expressing yourself as one example of humanizing a business application for both work and play.

    Over the past month, Cisco’s made two major collaboration announcements. The first announcement with Lockheed Martin and Amazon showcases how communication and collaboration tools will support science. These companies teamed up to integrate human-machine interface technologies into NASA’s Orion spacecraft, providing an opportunity to learn how future astronauts could benefit from far-field voice technology, AI, and tablet-based video collaboration. It brings a new meaning to that old Star Trek line, “Space, the final frontier.”

    What’s interesting to me is not that we’re bringing collaboration to space. The average enterprise doesn’t care. What matters is that space communications represent the ultimate latency use case challenge. Finding a way to optimize collaboration to a destination with a minimum distance of 33.9 million miles (54.6 million kilometers) from Earth means that Webex collaboration will be highly optimized for all types of connections.

    Accessibility takes center stage

    Collaboration software and broadband services enabled people worldwide to meet and share ideas. Yet, there’s still room for improvement. Cisco’s second announcement shared advancements in the accessibility field. Many organizations are designing strategies to improve inclusivity, but fewer companies are evaluating how technologies such as Webex can improve the lives of employees with speech, hearing, and visual impairments.

    A blog by Cisco’s Javed Khan shared research from the World Health Organization, which stated 15% of the global population – over a billion people – live with some form of disability. In the United States alone, that number increases to 1 in 4 adults.  For example, nearly 300 million people are color blind. Khan shared advancements that Cisco was delivering on the accessibility front. A few highlights of these include:

    • Hosts, participants, and interpreters can customize simultaneous interpretation solutions, so each can participate more fully. For example, you can customize the stage to always keep a sign-language interpreter visible. It also supports assigning channels to interpreters for up to 110 languages– before and after the meeting starts.
    • The Webex admin console was updated to improve accessibility for users who are color blind. While we might not think of this, most administrator-based products and presentations rely heavily on charts and other visual cues to relay information.
    • The team decoupled closed captions from the Webex Assistant so all attendees will get closed captions without having to turn on the Assistant
    • Cisco now delivers isolation techniques within Webex that allow participants to hear more clearly by using AI to single out and boost the clarity of an individual’s voice.

    One area that I admire in Cisco’s strategy is how the company infuses the concepts of creating inclusive software throughout various job functions within the company. Khan said, “At Webex, our design, engineering, and product management team members are required to take accessibility education and hands-on training. It’s even built into the onboarding process for our designers, who recently won an award for Accessible Colors in Data Visualization for Webex Control Hub.”

    The changing face of Webex will fuel longer-term software growth. 

    Cisco’s long-term growth relies on expanding its recurring software subscription such as Webex collaboration services, cybersecurity services, and network management services. Intense competition in the sector means partnerships, innovation, and addressing new markets are crucial elements to helping Cisco expand its collaboration footprint. However, it’s challenging to convince enterprise buyers to purchase video collaboration solutions in addition to existing collaboration tools from Microsoft and Google.

    In recent months, Cisco’s been working hard to introduce innovations faster. In the fall of 2021, it launched a portfolio of communications products, including an integrated asynchronous camera feature, AI-powered sound, video enhancements, and services for hybrid in-person and virtual events. Vidcast, its asynchronous video messaging tool,  is now in beta. The company also updated its hardware portfolio with Webex Mini and luxury headsets.

    Online events continue to grow and show no signs of stopping. According to a survey by Kaltura, 92% of organizers switched to virtual events in 2021, 94% plan to continue with digital events in 2022, and 48% plan to increase how many they organize. Cisco includes Socio, its all-in-one event platform, as part of the Webex portfolio and suite pricing, providing significant savings over standalone event solutions from Hopin and Zoom. As hybrid events continue to grow, Cisco has the potential to grow with the market as companies look for new event strategies. Offering better event support also provides an opportunity to showcase Webex collaboration improvements to non-Webex users.

    In the past, collaboration suites acted as islands of productivity. Collaboration software worked wonderfully if you stayed within that island. Today the world is a different place. Organizations use a myriad of collaboration and communication tools to accomplish work. Collaboration suites must support integrating with other solutions, and Webex has embraced this trend. For example, the Cisco Webex Meetings integration with Slack enables users to invite contacts to a Webex scheduled meeting or Personal Room from within the Slack environment. Integrations like this are necessary to improve productivity and reduce misaligned teams’ risk.

    Business reliance on collaboration technologies will only grow, providing headroom for Webex to grow, even in the face of stiff competition. If Webex continues to innovate and rapidly release new features to market, it will remain relevant and has the opportunity to thrive as companies embrace a world of distributed hybrid work.

  • Interviewing Poly on the Future of Work

    The future of the workplace dominates virtual board rooms across the globe. Every executive Lopez Research speaks with has plans to restructure physical workplaces and digital remote work scenarios. These new hybrid workplace strategies reimagine three categories of work that include full-time remote work, full-time return to the office and nomadic work. A nomadic worker is an individual who spends a portion of their time at an office and a part of their time working remotely. Any of these workers will also be individuals that travel, work in coffee shops, or otherwise need connectivity to corporate services on the go.

    Image of Tom Puorro, the EVP and GM at Poly
    Poly’s Puorro shares insight on audio and video technology requirements for hybrid work

    While the categories of work haven’t changed, how organizations design their technology and work policies to support these scenarios will change in a post-COVID world. Recently I interviewed Tom Puorro, executive vice president and general manager of products at Poly, to get the company’s take on how this new hybrid workspace will evolve. Poly provides a wide range of hardware assets such as headsets, phones, and video devices. What may be lesser known is that Poly provides extensive management, software, and analytics to support work from anywhere. Given Poly’s heritage in producing inbuilding audio and video conferencing rooms, I was particularly interested in how the company sees the future of work in a post-COVID world.

    Now more than six months into the pandemic, it’s clear that flexible hybrid working locations are a part of our permanent new normal.  With the initial wave of “remote-lite” strategies behind us, companies are focusing on a hybrid approach that provides the policies, technologies and services to support safely and securely working anywhere. Puorro spoke of the three phases of technology deployments pre-pandemic, during the pandemic and post-pandemic.

    In the pre-pandemic phase, the discussion focused on how companies could deploy ubiquitous video. Companies were purchasing IP desk phones and phone service was slowly moving to the cloud. Huddle rooms that provided smaller, more affordable equipment were the hot item. Organizations, especially the federal government, were rolling out on-premise video equipment. The office concept was growing by leaps and bounds. Poly was providing headsets that allowed employees to focus and tune out the sounds around them and tools for collaborating around the office and at home. There was also a sense that there would be a migration to the cloud, but it would take time to manage that transition. Puorro said some customers were looking at between 1.5 to 3 years to make the transition to the cloud.

    The second phase, during the pandemic, ushered in a rapid move to the cloud for voice, video and collaboration services. Organizations rapidly bootstrapped solutions for the pandemic, but IT needs to move beyond quick and dirty, to long-standing hybrid workplace solutions.  Lopez Research calls this the move from remote-lite to remote-right. During this phase, an organization must revisit the tools it provides to its employees. With audio and video conferencing at an all-time high, businesses need to provide employees with better PCs and peripherals such as headsets, audio and video equipment. This is where Poly comes into the picture.

    Both during and post-pandemic Puorro said organizations have a better appreciation for how a specific physical environment changes a company’s technology requirements. Employees need solutions that deliver the right audio, visual and lighting quality to get the job done, regardless of location.  For example, employees need headphones that support all-day use and bi-directional noise canceling. Employees need high-quality cameras. Companies also need to upgrade their aging fleets of PCs with newer PCs, Chromebooks, or other devices that have the performance characteristics to support video.

    Looking and sounding good on video calls is a new business imperative. Another lesson learned during the pandemic is that there’s no “one size fits all” collaboration solution. A business needs to purchase hardware that will work well with all of the video services because you’re going to be on Google Meet, LogMeIn, Microsoft Teams, Cisco’s WebEx and Zoom. Even if your company standardizes on a collaboration solution, a firm still needs to communicate across companies. For example, Poly mentioned that one of its consulting client’s needs collaboration hardware that works with whatever software their client’s using. Poly noted how it’s been delivering hardware that’s optimized to support cross-company and cross-service collaboration. Puorro said audio and video flexibility, high comfort and high-quality experiences are part of the new digital workplace imperative.

    Reimaging the work and collaborative experience 

    Going forward, Poly believes group environments, such as conference rooms and huddle rooms, won’t go away. However, some of the dynamics may change and technology will play a key role in the return to the office. For example, conference rooms will have fewer people in them to support social distancing. Meanwhile, huddle rooms will convert to personal video-enabled offices. Puorro said in the post-pandemic world, companies will create a clear distinction between group experiences and personal experiences. Group experiences, such as conference rooms, will offer dedicated devices experiences where you walk into a room and use your personal device or voice to join a video call or start an audio conference without touching any equipment. The industry was discussing this vision pre-pandemic, but these interaction models will be commonplace in the post-pandemic world.

    Puorro also spoke about recreating collaborative and open spaces. He noted open environments would change to be adaptive spaces, such as glassed-in public areas where you’re physically separated but visually together. In this scenario, Puorro described how companies need to rethink equipment requirements, such as offering headsets to support acoustics in highly reflective environments. Additionally, Puorro said Poly designed its hardware to support frequent cleaning, which many customers are requesting today. Customers are also asking for features to support social distancing, such as notifying IT if a room has exceeded capacity.

    A new imperative: supporting many networks of one

    Lopez Research expects the future of work to evolve from managing networks and services at the building level to managing services based on a user’s location. Lopez Research calls this supporting the “many networks of one vision.” It’s clear from my conversation with Poly that it agrees. Puorro talked about balancing the needs of IT while creating a compelling user experience. He said, “Technology must demonstrate value. The end-user experience must offer high-quality and ease, but the IT administrator also needs to ensure security interoperability, compliance and manageability of those products. Poly says it will is focused on balancing those two ends of the spectrum going forward.”

    Poly says it’s designing holistic, plug and play solutions with management and analytics to support what that many networks with one vision. Poly’s goal is to provide employees with a plug and play experience, that works effectively, and gets upgraded without the user doing anything. On the back end, the system needs to monitor each user’s experience and alert IT of any current or potential issues. New intelligence services will provide insight into what parameters have changed; proactively suggest changes to improve performance and offer recommendations to resolve performance issues for impacted users.

    From my discussions with Puorro and others, several things are clear. Remote work is here to stay, and companies will reimage workspaces for safety and collaboration. Cloud-resident services will enable the change to a hybrid workspace and video will have a more significant role than we ever imagined. As Puorro said, “Successful companies won’t mandate that everyone returns to the office. On-premise services will erode over time, whether it’s a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) or a Multipoint Control Unit (MCU), as organizations migrate to cloud services. Moving to the cloud is still a heavy lift, but it’s no longer a nice to have. Cloud migration is a business imperative.”

    It’s an exciting but challenging time for all organizations. Despite the dire times, Puorro ended our conversation with a note of optimism. “The opportunity for businesses is endless. There’s so much capability available through these new services. It just comes down to how fast you can adopt the technology to seize the opportunity.”

    A version of this was posted on my contributor column at Forbes.com