Cisco spark

Cisco Canada Blog / Collaboration / Meet Cisco Spark By Dean La Riviere, GM, Collaboration, Cisco CanadaLast week at Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, we ushered in a new era of employee communication. As Cisco SVP Rowan Trollope wrote on the Cisco blog:To get work done, people need to be able to message, meet and call each other without thinking about it and without stopping to consider what device they are using. Whether they are on a room system, a desktop phone, or a mobile phone, they should all work the same. When you get a call you should be able to answer on any of your devices–and if you want to change the device you are using, that should be easy too. Today’s announcements about moving our core collaboration products to the cloud under a single platform, Cisco Spark, take us to this wonderful new reality. With the new Cisco Spark platform– and the groundbreaking new collaboration technologies built upon it–we finally start to usher in that futuristic world we’ve all been dreaming of. After all, collaboration is about people working together to accomplish a common goal and that is what we are focused on with Cisco Spark. Concurrently assuring the integrity of the solution as network based, secure and complete across the realm of collaboration applications introduces -without hyperbole – something really new and exciting.Over the coming months I will explore our collaboration portfolio further and explain the impact of solutions, like the ones announced last week, on businesses (and users) in Canada.But for now, here is a bit more information on our exciting Cisco Spark announcement:Cisco Spark mixes messaging, meeting and calling in such a simple way that it is hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. With Cisco Spark, all three are parts of a complete user experience. Cisco Spark Hybrid Services enables entirely new and amazing experiences by connecting phone systems and on-premise equipment to the cloud; and Cisco Spark for Developers provides powerful, open APIs so developers can create innovative and useful apps that extend the value of Spark.Stay tuned as there’s a lot to come for Cisco Spark in 2016 and much more across our collaboration solutions, but in the meantime download the app, and let me know your thoughts on Spark and this announcement by leaving a comment below.Happy Holidays and hey … even Clark ‘Sparky’ Griswold is aboard!Dean

ORLANDO, FL, March 8, 2016 – The tools we use to get work done should be simple, affordable, mobile, and, frankly, fun. That’s why we created the Cisco Spark™ service, the industry’s first integrated and cloud-based collaboration service. It lets companies of all sizes buy messaging, meeting and calling from the cloud in a simple “per user per month” subscription model. To date, Cisco Spark has cut email by as much as 50% for some customers. Today we’re sharing four pieces of news on Cisco Spark: 1 - Have a good idea? Our new $150 million investment in the Cisco Spark ecosystem could help you bring it to life. We created Cisco Spark for Developers because we believe some of the best ideas will come from the outside. Tagnos, for instance, had the great idea to use our open APIs to create an application that can shorten hospital patient wait times. We want to make sure all great ideas come to life. We don’t want a lack of funding or support to get in the way. So in partnership with Cisco® Investments we have created a fund to invest $150 million in the Cisco Spark ecosystem. This fund will cover direct investments, joint development, additional enhancements and developer support. The fund will incubate great ideas so they become great applications and integrations. Find out more about the Cisco Spark Innovation Fund here. 2 - The complete Cisco Spark service is now available in the United States. As of today, companies in the United States can get all three services that make up Cisco Spark: message, meeting and call. Message and meeting components are available in 30 countries. Click here for details. Also, providers and partners around the world are working to create services based on Cisco Spark. They include Verizon, Dimension Data, West Unified Communications Services and IntelePeer. 3 - New “bots” make work life easier. Have you ever wanted to, say, update your photo in the company directory but you didn’t know who to ask? Now, when you don’t know who to ask, you can ask a “bot.” Bots

You can think of collaboration tools—messaging, meetings, calling—as the central nervous system of the modern organization. But traditional collaboration platforms, with their disparate applications, interfaces, and delivery models, have often been complex and frustrating—both for end-users and the businesses implementing them. Part of the problem has been balancing everything that global enterprise and government customers need. On the one hand, they want collaboration capabilities that are totally flexible, available everywhere, and easy to update with new experiences. On the other, they want enterprise-class security and data sovereignty.At Cisco, we think they shouldn’t have to choose. We’re unleashing the next revolution in collaboration with Cisco Spark. It combines our industry-leading collaboration capabilities into a single, cloud-consumable “as-a-service” (SaaS) offering for the first time.This is a huge win for enterprise customers, who no longer have to license software, and maintain onsite infrastructure and staff to run it. But it’s an even bigger deal for service providers, who can now provide next-generation collaboration capabilities more easily, while leveraging their networks to deliver them with rock-solid security and control.Service providers like Verizon, Dimension Data, and others can provide differentiated, seamless collaboration experiences—from mobile devices to the boardroom—with a lot less capital and operational investment. They can use a single cloud-based platform to extend these services to businesses of any size. And, because Cisco Spark has open APIs, they can add their own capabilities and services to bring amazing new experiences to their customers. It’s a winning combination—and a $24 billion global opportunity.Inside SparkCisco Spark brings together everything that enterprise and government customers need to work smarter and more productively. That includes conferencing, file sharing, audio and video calling, and more—all with a single experience that works wherever they are, on any device.For our service provider partners, it’s a huge business opportunity. Since Cisco Spark