With Cisco and Microsoft working together here, the companies can deliver a better hardware based room solution. However, room based collaboration is still a necessity for larger group settings in classrooms, boardrooms and even larger huddle spaces where desktop based video is at best a crutch and at worst unusable. Microsoft Teams, will inherently be heavily adopted simply based upon its massive deployment volume within the Office 365 suite.

Office Volume Drives Adoption, Zoom Also a Factor In most organizations there will be a significant distribution of tools used for collaboration (Check out our research that looks at collaboration tool usage), and while Cisco and MS lead, this partnership may be the beginning of a growing trend to enable more interoperability between room based collaboration and software video/collaboration platforms. Of course Webex has a strong desktop product as well, but this partnership is rooted in Cisco and Microsoft wanting to deliver a consistent user interface to MS Teams users that have room system requirements. While we have entered an age where technology companies have become quite proficient at vacillating between competitor and partner, this is one of those cases where two is better than one.Īs it pertains to collaboration, we are in an era where collaboration still isn’t ubiquitous in most organizations and this has been a byproduct of things like choice, shadow IT, device preference, legacy equipment, technical debt and user experience - to name a few.Ĭisco leads in end point technology for collaboration and Microsoft has the volume of desktop. For more on the announcements, read Cisco’s Blog from SVP Sri Srinivasan.Īnalyst Take: I believe that this partnership is very good for both companies. With today’s announcements we hope to simplify and accelerate interoperability options for our customers as they adopt Cisco Webex Teams and Webex Meetings solutions within their organizations. First, Cisco Webex will introduce an interop solution that will be certified as a Microsoft Cloud Video Interop (CVI) offering to allow Cisco Webex Room devices and SIP video conferencing devices to join Microsoft Teams meetings with a reliable interop experience. The News: Today Microsoft and Cisco are announcing a partnership that enables Cisco’s Webex video devices to connect to the Microsoft Teams meeting services in multiple ways.

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