In the business collaboration industry, Cisco is viewed as one of the key players when it comes to innovation. They regularly release new products and issue upgrades to their existing software and hardware to enhance their capabilities.

This article takes a look at five of the most interesting and exciting developments that are currently becoming available to customers or will be in the near future.

At the recent Cisco Live Europe event, Cisco had an area named Integrations and Workflows where they were demonstrating all the new and exciting bots, APIs, and SDKs for Webex Teams and Cisco Jabber. The information that was presented alluded to Cisco’s vision to provide “uninterrupted work”, i.e. drastically improve your efficiency by integrating platforms with one another so you have to spend less time switching over and performing tasks that could otherwise be done by a bot.

You are likely familiar with Cisco Webex and what it can do.

Although you may think you know what this platform has to offer, there have been some fantastic changes that Cisco has been making in the last few months that you might not be aware of.

The first is high frame rate sharing. You can now share content over Webex at a much greater frame rate meaning your meetings and presentations will be smoother than ever before. There have also been updates to the Whiteboarding and annotation functionality on the Webex Board. These features have been further improved, allowing you to have brainstorming and critiquing sessions in a much more valuable and efficient way.

More Google and Microsoft integrations have been introduced to Webex helping to streamline your everyday tasks. You should also be aware that Cisco has further upgraded the usability of their video conferencing products by allowing you to join from an even greater list of devices, introducing a one-button push to start meetings, and redesigning the video-centric user experience.

We’ve covered this topic before on our blog but Cisco has vastly improved their Webex Voice Assistant since then. It’s one of the most exciting ways Cisco is introducing AI to its technology and will inevitably improve the way you work in the near future.

The main concept is that instead of having to navigate an app to perform tasks that need doing on Webex or Webex Teams, you can instead give a voice command and the task will be done automatically. For example, you could say “Call Kevin” and the technology would show you all your contacts named Kevin from which you could select the right one.

We can’t wait for this AI Voice Assistant to come out properly as we look forward to playing around with it and discovering all the different ways it can improve the way we work.

The term ‘Huddle Spaces’ is cropping up more and more over the last year. What it is describing is a small collaboration room that can host meetings for about 2-5 people. In the past, technology innovators had not spent a lot of time trying to break into this market, but this is definitely not true anymore.

Cisco Have recently been releasing a whole host of devices that are specifically designed for this use case; for example, the Webex Share and the Room Kit Mini. These are smaller, and more cost-effective ways that businesses can turn any small room into a modern innovation suite.

The Webex Board is undoubtedly one of Cisco’s most impressive collaboration devices due to its slick design and fantastic feature-set. It’s been two years since it was first released and the uptake within design teams and agile software organisations has shown the value this board can bring to meetings and innovation processes. The developments that Cisco has continued to release to the Webex Board has captured the essence of physical/in-room collaboration with remote collaboration. Blurring the lines between these methods of working has enabled many Cisco customers to revolutionise the way they work and the structure of their workforce.

As you can see, Cisco is making some big strides within its collaboration portfolio and continuing to improve their already popular products. Look forward to even more developments over the coming year as it looks like there are even more exciting advancements on the way.