Collaborate. Many things come to mind when I think of collaboration, but ultimately it boils down to this: to collaborate means to ‘work with another person or group in order to achieve or do something.’ Simple enough, right? Well that’s how it should be!
The reality for many of us, however, is that work life has become anything but ‘simple.’ We’re always on the go and increasingly find ourselves working with colleagues, customers and partners globally. Work-life balance is less distinct and trending more towards a ‘work-life blend.’ To help manage this complexity, working with anyone from anywhere, on any device, is not only useful, but is a necessity. Gone are the days where one can get by with just a simple desk phone. In today’s world we communicate and collaborate through multiple modalities best suited for the situation at-hand, whether that’s through voice, video, chat, screensharing, or some combination thereof. Oftentimes we accomplish this via a mobile device.
Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group is striving to deliver a user experience with easy-to-use tools that work together seamlessly, from the browser to the boardroom, and everywhere in between. Cisco Collaboration business leader, Rowan Trollope, aims to do so with simplicity as a top priority. Rowan conveyed this theme during his recent keynote at Enterprise Connect in Orlando. Working without an army of IT support professionals, Rowan demonstrated how easy it is to setup and use endpoints from Cisco’s video portfolio by completing the setup himself in a matter of minutes. Rowan later announced a collaborative program to offer rewarding, yet simple experiences to end users through a WebEx on a Chromebook.
We’re excited about our current course and the opportunities that lie ahead, yet we also recognize that there are startups doing other invaluable things in collaboration. Companies that share a similar vision to ours but focus on other complementary technologies could be ideal investment and commercial partners for Cisco. As a leader across multiple segments of Unified Communications, including CallManager, Unified Videoconferencing, TelePresence and WebEx Meeting Center, there are multiple ways to work with us!
When it comes to investments, we strive to provide value to our portfolio companies beyond just dollars invested. This includes go-to-market relationships, customer opportunities, a large channel partner ecosystem, and knowledge and expertise from Cisco senior execs who have run and operated successful businesses of many sizes. Next-generation collaboration is changing the game in more ways than one. If your company is a ‘change agent’ in this exciting sector and might be looking to engage with a world class organization like Cisco, we’d enjoy hearing from you!