Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) powers the world’s Internet experiences. That company has invited reporters to an event in San Francisco next week.
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As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I expected Spark to be a significant part of the Collaboration Summit, and that certainly is the case.
Tuesday’s announcement for Spark’s next big step more closely resembles Chambers’ dream service, which he outlined past year in public remarks that seemed so extemporaneous that they actually may have come as news to his own engineers. Cisco Spark will start a room so the group can share content and ideas.
The vendor talked about offering a purchase model based on building blocks, or incremental functionally, to meet a customer’s needs.
“We would be insane not to do that”, reflected Chris Wiborg, director of collaboration portfolio marketing at Cisco, about connecting Spark to more of the tech giant’s cloud and networking products. The company has yet to add such features, focusing instead on messaging. The service has common management for endpoint registration, provisioning, analytics and user control. Delivered through an easy-to-deploy SaaS platform, the Altocloud software helps companies reach online prospects at just the right moment to help close sales, drive revenue and streamline customer experiences. At the event, Trollope and other executives introduced an array of new capabilities for the Spark platform, including collaboration-as-a-service, hybrid services that enable on-premises equipment to use Spark through the cloud, and a developer portal.
Spark, which debuted previous year as an app called Project Square, is central to the company’s strategy of using cloud computing to deliver collaboration to everyone in an organization. I’m sure there are more planned, but this initial release includes four hybrid services.
It connects phone systems to the cloud.
Cisco Spark allows you to turn a phone call into a video meeting, move a video call from a room system to your mobile phone and then to another room with a single click. “Cisco is hosting a global cloud service for all of our collaboration technologies – not just WebEx now”.
WebEx had been working toward a one-link approach to accessing conferences, giving everyone a single URL and letting the cloud-based software mitigate the problems of delegating access. The act of placing the call automatically creates a meeting in the Spark room that the two of you share.
“This calling service is a multi-instance, pure cloud implementation”, said Cisco’s Ross Daniels, “delivered and hosted from the Cisco cloud and sold by partners”.
At launch, Cisco announced integration with a number of application partners, such as GitHub, Instagram, Pagerduty, Trello, Zendesk, Zapier, IFTTT, and built.io.
Availability and Pricing Cisco Spark for Developers and select services of Cisco Spark are available today. So, customers can first choose their message and meeting services – block 1, 2 or 3.
There are also three add-on options: rooms, conference audio and additional centers.
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Since Rowan Trollope took over as the head of the Collaboration Business Unit at Cisco, he has been laser-focused on improving the usability of Cisco products.
