Cisco rolls out the future

Cisco has unveiled the next phase of its vision for collaboration, which focuses on delivering innovations that embrace the modern workspace and enable users to work smarter and more efficiently from virtually anywhere.

With South Africa’s fixed broadband speeds set to increase by more than 2.3 fold by 2017 and network connections quadrupling over the same period, Cisco designed the new solutions to make it easier for teams to instantly connect, communicate and collaborate. Tailor-made for the increasingly mobile and distributed South African workforce, these new innovations are simple to use, are highly intuitive and make collaboration easy to scale across organisations of all sizes.

The modern workspace will integrate tools at work with many of the tools employees use at home: support mobility trends that enable people to access information and communicate from their device of choice in ways not possible just a short time ago, and simplify processes for workers and IT alike while maintaining security.

Additional details:

– Enabling Mobile Workers and Distributed Teams to Work More Efficiently

Today’s organisations need to support mobile workers by providing them with collaboration technologies that are designed around mobility first. Cisco is fully focused on delivering the technologies that remove barriers to instant collaboration and make using technology delightful. To give organisations a fast onramp to secure communications, today Cisco announced Cisco Expressway, an advanced gateway that maintains security without the need for device-level registration, accounts, and passwords.

– Simplifying Engagements with Collaboration Everywhere

Additionally, Cisco announced Jabber Guest, a solution that utilises Expressway’s security functionality to give ‚”guest access‚” to anyone outside a corporate organisation (e.g., a business partner, a consultant or a consumer needing assistance) so they can communicate with employees inside it using high-definition voice and video via a web browser or mobile device.

– Introducing endpoints designed for simplicity and scale

In its second generation, the Cisco TelePresence MX300 team or room-based endpoint features a more modern, sleek and approachable design that blends functionality and clean lines to maximise aesthetic appeal and usability. Cisco also unveiled the Cisco IP Phone 7800 Series. Optimal for midmarket customers, these phones have a new ergonomic design, come with intuitive navigation and wideband audio on all paths, and are available now. Since they are PoE class-1 devices, they are very frugal in terms of power consumption and also intelligent ‚Äë they can automatically power down during off-hours, saving energy and helping to reduce costs by as much as 60 percent.

– Marrying the mobile and on-premise worlds to get work done faster

Cisco has announced a set of capabilities that blurs the line between the mobile world—which includes many of the devices end users prefer to use at home—and fixed/on-premise collaboration environments. Called Intelligent Proximity, this innovation allows users to link their personal mobile devices with on-premise products in the office to enhance the experience.

– Infrastructure advancements that simplify IT management of collaboration tools

Cisco Prime Collaboration gives IT a single unified management console from which to manage the vast majority of Cisco collaboration products‚Äîfrom it they can deploy servers, provision devices from the phones on users’ desks to the Jabber clients on their laptops, and provide general feature management and service assurance.

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