This week, Cisco's GM of collaboration, Rowan Trollope, issued a blog announcing a major update to the company's popular WebEx product. Given the market leading position that WebEx holds, one may wonder, why fix something that isn't broken? WebEx currently hosts over 15 million meetings per month, which consumes over 3 billion minutes per month. With that kind of usage, why upset the apple cart?
The reason is that despite the success of WebEx, the product is fundamentally flawed. It's not just a WebEx issue, but something the whole industry deals with. Enterprise Web, audio and video conferencing platforms have been developed in silos and the technology has remained that way since its inception. These silos of communications have prevented us from having true unified communications.
I had discussed this with Rowan Trollope at Cisco Live earlier this year, and his feeling was that we really had, at best, "aggregated communications" and were far from fulfilling the vision of UC. During his keynote, he also was pretty matter-of-fact that Cisco (and all the other vendors) have made UC way too hard to deploy and use.
Consider a virtual meeting in today's world. It's often the case that several systems need to be invoked to have a single virtual meeting. In fact, earlier this week I had a group call with a vendor (who I'll leave nameless) that had a list of options in the invite--"If joining by audio only, call X; if joining by H.323 video, call Y; if joining by video IP, call Z". The vendor shared the presentation over a web conferencing service and then e-mailed the document out for anyone that couldn't join on line. So many disjointed services make for a highly inefficient meeting.
Also, I'm sure we've all had the case where we've joined a bridge and found it occupied by another conference call that hasn't finished up yet. Or had an audio conference go late and had a number of new people join your bridge. It seems to be a full-time job just managing all these resources.
Solving this level of complexity and inefficiency was the idea behind the new WebEx. No more talking about web, audio or video conferencing and trying to figure out how to tie these together. Instead, there's just conferencing.
The WebEx cloud conferencing platform ties together desktop collaboration, desktop and mobile Jabber, Cisco TelePresence endpoints, web sharing (old WebEx), Lync endpoints and other third-party endpoints into a single conversation.
The image below is from the pre-briefing I had with Cisco's Melody Kee and Matt Barham. I'm shown in two video windows because I connected via my desktop and iPhone. I could also have connected from my EX60 desktop unit, but no conversation needs three Zeuses. The WebEx conferencing platform allows multiple people to join using any device and any communications medium but still be in a single conversation. Rowan has referred to this as being able to collaborate "from the pocket to the boardroom".
Cisco also improved the whole look and feel of WebEx. Now when you first join, there are big buttons that prompt you on what to do next. It also gives the user a status showing how long before a connection is made to a conference. A much richer experience all around.
The other big change to WebEx is the concept of the personal collaboration meeting room (CMR). With traditional WebEx, everyone shared a common meeting space. This could cause problems when meetings overlap. WebEx CMR gives every individual their own virtual meeting room. This is analogous to every worker having a personal conference room located adjacent to their office instead of having to share a defined number of rooms.
The below image shows Rowan's personal CMR. He can populate it with whatever information he requires, including documents and presentations. This gives Rowan a persistent meeting location that is his and his alone. Now anyone joining a conference of his can connect via a single click, regardless of device. No participant codes, passwords or other things that make joining meetings difficult. As I said, it's similar to having an individual conference room, except WebEx CMR is a cloud-based, virtual resource.
The update to WebEx is long overdue and by the looks of it, Rowan Trollope is staying true to his mission of making Cisco technology radically easier to use. This was something he discussed the very first presentation he gave. Audio, video and web conferencing are dead--long live conferencing.
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