Oleg Tolchinsky, Vice President, Architectures, Cisco Canada
The way people work has recently undergone a drastic change. Historically, we have never experienced such a rapid transformation in how we get things done. The sudden shift to working remotely has driven humanity to re-invent how businesses and teams operate when in-person meetings aren’t possible. Organizations are now actively investing in the way forward, from establishing flexible working arrangements to ensuring a safe return to the office. It’s a complex process, but we must seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fundamentally improve how people work, wherever they might be. The path forward is indeed the hybrid workplace.
The hybrid workplace is not achieved with any one product or solution. In the hybrid world, webinars, webcasts and large-scale events are increasingly important as a means of communication, both with your internal teams and your customers. Customer Experience takes centre stage driven by a new set of customer expectations. Established technologies like calling and messaging take on a renewed importance as we focus on bridging the distance between people. Inclusive, rich meeting experiences are imperative to virtually every company and industry.
In the physical office, networks are being rapidly reimagined. The way we connect to our critical cloud applications is suddenly a top priority for everyone, not just IT. The network is tasked with doing more, like informing real estate decisions and protecting the physical safety of employees. Security of people, devices and data is everything.
A hybrid workplace, if done correctly, provides for flexible, inclusive and seamless work from anywhere.
Benefits of the hybrid workplace:
- Improved employee and customer experience
- Increased productivity
- Expansion of the talent pool and ability to retain top talent
- Greater organizational flexibility and speed
- Optimized real estate expenses
At Cisco we’ve been working hard to make sure Webex is there to enable the connections we’ve all come to rely on. And now we’re looking forward and seeing how we can prepare our partners and customers for the future of work. Because at the end of the day, work is no longer a place you go, work is what you do.
What’s new with Cisco Webex?
Enhancements to meeting accessibility – We have added high contrast settings on desktop, in app keyboard shortcut keys and improved navigation via control tab. Include everyone with features that make sure anyone can participate regardless of their geography, communication style, or language.
View participants and content at the same time. Having the best meeting experience, means better collaboration and engagement. With the new active share window, the presenter can see all participants in a floating video window, that can be dragged to their preferred location, while sharing and viewing their content.
High call quality no matter where you are. Elevate a call to a meeting. Move your call from one device to another or turn it into a video meeting without skipping a beat. Stay connected and secure with 99.99% committed availability.
Webex Events allows you scale to reach larger audiences, easily tailor registration pages to best reflect the look and feel of your brand and create more engaging experiences for attendees. Encourage active participation with moderated Q&A, chat, polling, emoji reactions, and gesture recognition.
It offers teachers the abilities to host sessions, 1on1 student meetings, parent/teacher conferences and much more. Teachers can also see attendance reports that document when students join and leave class sessions. Students have easy access to class recordings, a personalized dashboard and calendar to stay on top of their classes.
To meet the growing need for telemedicine, healthcare providers require solutions that integrate with their EHR platform and provide a seamless, simple to use experience for caregivers and patients. Experience high quality HD video and audio for face-to-face consults between patients and doctors, anytime, anywhere.
Meet customers where they are, with new digital channels. Use virtual agents to easily handle routine interactions, provide seamless transitions, and connect transcripts to live agents for more complex inquiries. Let customers connect via text, social, chat, email, and voice
Cisco DNA Spaces has a variety of built-in apps that help organizations maintain a safe, trusted workplace and comply with safety guidelines as employees return to office. View real-time metrics on the active visitors currently at your location. Using these metrics, you can set density threshold rules to specify the maximum number of people that can occupy your location. Density rules can be set either as density per area or as a device count. You can also specify which building, floor, or zone you would like the rules to apply to. When the density rule is exceeded, a safety notification can be triggered to Cisco Webex Teams™.
Secure access service edge (SASE) combines networking and security functions in the cloud to deliver secure access to applications, anywhere users work-all in a single subscription service. Give remote workers secure access to applications and data, from anywhere. Control access and enforce the right security protection anywhere users work.
