WebEx

Goodbye Spark, hello Webex (lower case e). At the 2018 Cisco Collaboration Summit in Phoenix, Rowan Trollope and the Cisco team made A LOT of announcements, including convergence of the Cisco Spark and Webex platforms, as well as new branding.

The Cisco Webex brand now includes:

• Cisco Webex Calling – formerly Spark Calling, over time to be powered by BroadSoft
• Cisco Webex Meetings – a new video-first meeting experience
• Cisco Webex Teams – formerly Cisco Spark

Earlier this month, Cisco had their Collaboration Business Update briefing for analysts, and there were some interesting takeaways I think are worth sharing with our readers; not just for what Cisco has in mind for UC&C, but also where they are focusing for growth. Cisco has been making some big moves recently, and whether you're a channel or a technology buyer, these cannot be ignored. As analysts, we hear both technology and business-level messages, and Cisco looks for us to reflect our conclusions back to the market.

I was chatting recently with a product manager for one of the larger UC vendors and he mentioned that one of his dev teams is working on trying to integrate their backend server with a competitor's desktop client (in effect, allowing their own desktop client to talk to their competitor's desktop client). I was astonished by this as it is so yesterday in thinking about how people collaborate now.

Cisco's distributor, Scansource, is being repositioned so that it can include the company's voice, video and collaboration solutions.

The whole Cisco practice will be moved by ScanSource from its Security unit to its Catalyst Telecom unit which focuses on unified communications collaboration. In this past, only Cisco security and networking gear was part of the Cisco practise.