Feature Story

Enterprise Connect 2019: What you need to know

Catch up with what Cisco was up to at the collaboration conference.
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The 2019 Enterprise Connect conference gathered businesses, entrepreneurs, and collaboration enthusiasts to Orlando, Florida to discuss the future of work. As the collaboration industry faces digital transformation in its products, services, and architecture, players like Cisco have collaboration expertise to share. Cisco’s SVP of the Collaboration Technology Group Amy Chang took the keynote stage on Wednesday to discuss the company’s new cognitive collaboration initiative.

 

In case you missed it, here’s everything else you need to know about Cisco and Enterprise Connect.

Cisco Webex’s X-Factor

Cisco’s collaboration tool Webex has crossed many milestones, and the company wanted to share some of its x-factor qualities. These include hosting more than 130 million meeting attendees per month, more than 360 million meetings hosted per year, and more than 85 billion meeting minutes held annually. To learn more about these numbers (including the percentage of Fortune 500 companies that use Webex) watch the video above.

Cognitive collaboration

Speaking of Webex, Cisco is now driving its cognitive collaboration initiative—a plan to take data from collaboration and enterprise tools and apply machine learning to help create useful context. Cisco is adding Proactive Join to Webex Assistant, a feature that proactively asks users if they want to join a specific meeting upon walking into a meeting room.

In addition, Webex Assistant is getting First Match, a way for users to connect with the right people in your company. If you ask Webex to “Call Susan”, First Match will find the Susan you communicate with most on Webex Teams and suggest them. If it’s not the right person, the tool will give you alternate picks.

First Match uses conversational AI technology that Cisco acquired with its MindMeld acquisition in 2017.

See also: What's on your desk, Tim Tuttle? 

Another new feature is People Insights, a feature that allows users to get dynamic profiles of participants in a meeting. Participants can always control what kind of information is shown through a settings function. This tool is also based on an acquisition technology—specifically Cisco’s 2018 acquisition of Accompany.  

Along with People Insights, Customer Insights gives Customer Journey Analytics via the hybrid cloud model, providing a more contextual experience for the entire on-prem portfolio.

See also: People@Cisco- Amy Chang

Facial recognition is also being added to Webex. Through a user-submitted profile picture, a Webex device can scan the image and give it an identifying number, which then gets paired with the user. This feature will be available in June.

Webex Assistant and First Match is available now across the Webex Room Series. Proactive Join will also be generally available in June.

To learn more about cognitive collaboration, check here.

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