Unless you have been hiding beneath a rock for the past few months, you will have noticed that the Collaboration market is trending towards the cloud and that means less on-premise equipment for Collaboration Engineers to install, configure and maintain. Central to Cisco’s collaboration cloud strategy is Cisco Spark. This is an app that allows secure business messaging / file sharing, meetings through Spark rooms and video/audio calls.

In July 2016 at Cisco Live in Las Vegas, Cisco SVPs Rowan Trollope and Jens Meggers, and Cisco VP Jonathan Rosenberg gave a sneak peek into what the future holds for Cisco Spark. The demonstration at the keynote showed the audience that a new telepresence unit can be taken out of the box and connected to the cloud in a matter of minutes with very little technical configuration. There is no need for anything on-prem-  you just need an account in the cloud and the Serial Number of your client you are good to go. Furthermore, in Fall 2016 Spark will be integrated into iOS 10 which will allow enterprise voice/video calls to be made from an iPhone or iPad. Lots of cool new things in the pipeline! Keep a close eye on Rowan’s blog.
Continue reading State of the Union – Shift to the Cloud (CCIE Collaboration) →