Those of you familiar with the Cisco collaboration app will know that users have been able to make Spark-to-Spark calls for a while. Cisco describes the Spark calling service as "a complete business collaboration service from the Cisco cloud that enables customers to message, meet, or call anyone, anywhere, and anytime." With this offering, for small and medium-sized businesses and the midmarket, Cisco will go head to head with cloud communications providers such as 8x8 and RingCentral. Recalling Cisco Collaboration Summit 2015, Daniels pointed to the declaration there by Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Collaboration Technology Group, that "we're showing you an app, but we're building a platform." Cisco is now making good on that promise, turning Spark into a full collaboration and communications platform with a number of services, Daniels said.Īrguably the most important of those services, which you can see in the graphic above, is Cisco Spark Service. "We aim to help them extend the value of that prem investment while allowing them to participate in cloud services." While Cisco has made an enormous investment in Spark, it recognizes that "a massive portion of our installed base, indeed of the market as a whole, still wants to have one foot, one leg, half a body remaining in the on-prem world," Daniels said.
He has worked with so many of us for so long that he wasn't just prepared for our questions, but he often predicted which analyst would ask which question.
Kudos to Daniels, a 15-year Cisco contact center and collaboration veteran, on an excellent session. I take my title from the opening comments of Ross Daniels, Cisco senior director, collaboration marketing leader, during an hour-long pre-briefing for industry analysts last Friday. It then formally launched the app under the new Cisco Spark brand and announced general availability at Enterprise Connect 2015 in March. Regular No Jitter readers and industry watchers will recall that Cisco previewed its collaboration application as Project Squared at last year's summit. Today at the eighth-annual Cisco Collaboration Summit taking place in San Francisco, the company unveiled a series of enhancements that, as promised, turn its Spark collaboration application into a platform.
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