Cisco Continues to Reimagine Collaboration—and This Time it’s Personal

The DX80 has a 23-inch screen and comes equipped with the new Intelligent Audio feature. This feature would ensure that the colleague on the screen would not hear noise from the meeting going on in the background of this shot—even if that meeting got very loud.

The DX70

Cisco’s IP Phone 8800 Series

Cisco’s IP Phone 8800 Series at work

SAN JOSE, Calif. and SAN FRANCISCO– May 19, 2014 – Today at CiscoLive! 2014, Cisco continues to reimagine the way we connect with those inside and outside of our organizations by delivering three new personal collaboration tools designed to help get highly collaborative work done without technology hassles getting in the way. Two of these tools sit on the physical desktop and one resides in the cloud.

People who are working together on the same team or task aren’t necessarily on the same continent let alone in the same room—but they need to feel as if they are so they can do their best, most inspired work. Now more than ever, businesses must provide every worker—not just top executives—with tools that allow them to collaborate at a moment’s notice, without technology hassles, so they can get work done. Excellent collaboration technology for all is no longer a “nice to have”—it’s a “must have”. Business success relies upon this—both today and tomorrow, as future generations will continue to push the envelope in terms of where, when, and how work gets done.

The innovations Cisco announces today help customers quickly and simply connect people, conversations, and data in ways that can rapidly accelerate business outcomes—and they are priced to scale to every worker.

New innovations include:

On the desktop: personal collaboration devices that are fit for a CEO but priced for every worker
Somewhere in the pursuit of the perfect collaboration environment, workers’ desktops became cluttered with technologies purpose-built for specific tasks (e.g., voice-only phones, webcams, monitors). Having so many different technologies for unique tasks clearly adds cost for the company and complexity for the IT manager who must support them; it also adds frustration for users, who have different experiences as they move between different devices and collaboration modalities throughout the day.

Cisco aims to solve this with its new DX70 and DX80 desktop collaboration devices. Similar to how smart phones revolutionized our mobile lives, the Android-based DX70 and DX80 streamline and simplify our work lives by providing access to all the top tools and applications highly collaborative work requires. While this integrated desktop experience is fit for a CEO, it is priced to scale to every worker.

Top user benefits include:

– Unparalleled Experience.  With large screens that are completely operated by touch, the Android-based DX70 and DX80 bring together in one device Cisco’s deep expertise in HD video, high-end audio, and Web conferencing plus integrated business applications and Web browsing. The result is a collaboration experience unlike any other.

– Customizable Workspace. Using the fully-featured Android operating system, these devices possess a proven architecture with well-documented APIs so organizations and 3^rd parties can develop applications to address specific needs—be it a whiteboarding application or an integration with their CRM tool or a vertical application.

– Stunning Design. The DX70 and DX80 not only eliminate desktop clutter, but have sleek, inviting lines and are excellent examples of Cisco’s award-winning “Scandafornian”* design.

– Smart Technology.  The DX80 also comes equipped with Intelligent Audio, a brand new feature to ensure that what you see is what you hear; the person on the receiving end of your call sees and hears you—he will not hear distracting background noise (be it the barking dog in your home office or talkative coworkers in an adjacent workspace).  Additionally, the devices come equipped with Cisco’s recently announced Intelligent Proximity, so you can “pair” your DX with your mobile phone and have access to your personal contacts and call history, as well as move calls that are in progress—similar to the way you can transfer a call from your mobile phone to your car.

– Shareable Experiences. These devices are well suited for shared work environments since they can “remember” different users; a user simply enters his login credentials and the device quickly serves up his stored settings, contact lists, call histories and more.

In the cloud: your permanent rendezvous place, CMR
Cisco has deep and unparalleled experience delivering world-class video experiences via our on-premise telepresence solutions. At the same time, we’ve built the world’s largest real-time collaboration service in the cloud: Cisco WebEx®. Today we’re combining the power of telepresence with the scale and flexibility of WebEx® to deliver what we call Collaboration Meeting Rooms (CMRs). CMRs provide everyone with their own personal, private, always-available video collaboration space in the cloud. These rooms give you the ability to host meetings where attendees can join from the device of their choice—whether they choose a Cisco® video endpoint, many other standards-based video endpoints, desktop or mobile clients (such as WebEx), or even a soft client like Microsoft Lync to join your private cloud meeting room. It’s as easy as clicking your unique room URI.

Top user benefits include:

– Meet your way. Cisco CMRs can accommodate more concurrent users than any other enterprise-grade solution on the market. Additionally, users can schedule meetings, conduct instant meetings or meet in a permanent always-on meeting room using a dedicated meeting URI.

– Connect your way. You can easily access a CMR not only from most any endpoint—be it one from Cisco or any other standards-based endpoint, soft client and any WebEx-enabled mobile or desktop web client such as Jabber®. CMR also interoperates with Lync 2010 and 2013 as well as other third party clients.

– Deploy your company’s way. With today’s addition of a cloud-based option, businesses can now choose whatever deployment model works best for them—cloud, premise or hybrid.

Additional collaboration news today:
– Strength in Voice: New IP Phone 8800 Series and Celebrating 15 Years of IP Phones. Marking our 15^th year of innovation in IP phones, Cisco is introducing the IP Phone 8800 Series.  This series is the best-performing audio IP phone we’ve ever delivered. It also includes USB ports on select models for easy mobile-device charging, and Cisco Intelligent Proximity for Mobile Voice so workers can import contacts and call history or move the audio path of a voice or video call-in-progress from their mobile device to their 8800 Series desk phone.

– Cisco’s Collaboration Infrastructure: The Intelligence Behind the Experience. While endpoints and experiences tend to get the limelight, Cisco’s collaboration infrastructure is what makes it all happen; the infrastructure powers our industry-leading portfolio of voice, video, and conferencing services and endpoints, and simplifies the delivery of meaningful and effective business communications to any device, anywhere. And so Cisco is also today making significant updates with its infrastructure offerings; Some key areas that have been enhanced in by this release are in user self-care and single sign on (SSO), mobile call security, application integration, and video interworking.

* Scandinavian/Californian

SUPPORTING QUOTES

David Day, Global Director, WorkPlace Services, The Dow Chemical Company
“Usability, simplicity and integration are critical when it comes to propelling collaboration inside Dow and outside with customers, suppliers and partners. We continue to be impressed with Cisco’s agility in the market place and are excited about the innovations Cisco is making that can help foster even stronger collaboration among teams around the globe.”
Todd Strubbe, president of West’s Unified Communications operating segment
“Virtual meeting technology has a pretty simple mission: connecting people wherever they are in order to improve productivity and help knowledge workers do things more effectively—whether that’s via audio, video, or web conferencing. West’s Unified Communications solutions offer all these things to clients, either in the cloud, on-prem or as a hybrid. As one of the largest resellers of Cisco WebEx, we are excited to integrate Cisco’s CMR into our existing product portfolio because it aligns with our mission to bring leading hosted business communication solutions to the enterprise. CMR has the ability to scale to accommodate hundreds of participants at any time and offers broad interoperability, providing West with a more complete set of services that protect customers’ investments while delivering new ways to collaborate.”

Melinda Paras, CEO, Paras and Associates
“Ten years ago, Paras and Associates built something that had never been seen before: A video-over-IP call center for medical interpreters. Now, clinicians trust that they can reach language interpreters instantly—whether they are across the street, or across the country. High quality video enables a degree of nuance and rapport that you simply can’t achieve with just a telephone. We’ve quite literally built our business around Cisco video and the new endpoints announced today will help take our business to the next level.”
Chris Böttger, Senior Vice President , Collaboration Services, IVCi
“At IVCi, we specialize in helping enterprises video-enable their workforce because we are passionate that video can not only connect and inform decision-making, it can inspire and transform business processes. The recent announcements of the MX, SX and new desktop series in combination with IVCi’s Cisco certified Telepresence as a Service has driven down cost substantially while improving the user experience. The flexibility of delivering either on-premise, hybrid or cloud models allows us to video-enable every part of the enterprise.”

Rowan Trollope, SVP/GM, Collaboration Technology Group, Cisco
“The DX70 and DX80 were designed from the ground up to provide the best collaboration experience for every desk in an enterprise. They are truly mind-blowing devices. Combined with the Collaboration Meeting Room service, users can have their own always-on private meeting room to collaborate with anyone on any device at any time. Only Cisco can combine this amazing hardware, the incredible software, and the powerful network to provide anyone with their own dedicated collaboration space in the cloud – and on their desk – that they can call their own.”

SUPPORTING RESOURCES
Collaboration Blog by Cisco’s Rowan Trollope
Partner Blog by Cisco’s Richard McLeod
IP phones 15 year anniversary blog
Video of new products

RSS Feed for Cisco: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/rss.html

Availability Disclaimer: Many of the products and features described herein remain in varying stages of development and will be offered on a when-and-if-available basis. Products and features are subject to change at the sole discretion of Cisco, and Cisco will have no liability for delay in the delivery or failure to deliver any of the products or features set forth in this document.

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