Cisco’s digital event “Hybrid Work Made Real” showcased a Webex rebrand and a new subscription offering, all focused on fostering an inclusive workplace. Over the past year, the Webex team has been hard at work refining the user experience by adding features and intelligence to a product that overnight became critical to every customer because of the pandemic. Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration, pointed to more than 800 new features that Webex added and the acquisitions of Babblelabs to support live transcripts and translations, Slido to facilitate audience engagement, imimobile for intelligent customer interaction. Webex also expressed the intent to acquire Socio to boost its digital event experience.
The new Webex Suite embodies what the product offering has become and how customers should be thinking about their collaboration tools: a suite of services that come together in a fluid collaboration workflow that spans over different media, devices, and environments. Of course, the new suite also makes Webex more cost-effective for customers with a 40% discount over the a la carte solution bringing all the different capabilities together. For Cisco, one subscription that brings together calling, meeting, messaging, polling and events creates much more stickiness to Webex by lowering the risk of churn over one single feature while increasing discoverability by linking features together and adding ROI.
This kind of subscription bundles work very well in the consumer world and it seems that Cisco is very well aware that on the hardware side, competition comes from devices that cater to users first and IT second. It is no coincidence that Webex Suite brings a discount of up to 50% on hardware products from cameras to soundbars and all in one dedicated meeting devices like the Webex Desk family. When looking at the enterprise competition, the Webex Suite lands somewhere between Zoom and Microsoft Teams as it integrates much more than the former but does not engulf the user into a one-stop-shop productivity tool like the latter.
Cisco has been fostering diversity equity and inclusion within its organization as well as working on making an impact on society more broadly. “Powering an inclusive future for all” is not just a marketing mantra it is a commitment Cisco has made as it set out to positively impact 1 billion people by 2025. The Webex team started talking about wanting their solution to be inclusive at the end of 2020 as they were accelerating the deployment of new features and they wanted to deliver a product that leveraged technology to create an equitable collaboration environment. This is particularly important as companies are planning a return to the office and will have to cater to a workforce with different needs and desires regarding where they want to work. Being able to cater to all means ensuring that no matter where employees are located, home, office, an airport or hotel, we can collaborate effectively and easily. Webex addresses picture and sound parity using AI to enhance camera quality and deliver an individual video stream of participants in a meeting room so that remote participants can clearly hear individual voices and see facial expressions.
In this setting, inclusion means putting people first. In my mind, this has been a significant change across the board for collaboration tools, but for Webex in particular by placing usability first and richness of experience without sacrificing security and reliability. Being an inclusive collaboration platform also means seamlessly integrates different ways to communicate that might fit some people better. Consider introverted people who can lean on chat rather than raise their hand and verbally share their thoughts. People who might be attending a meeting in a language that is not their first language can use live translation to make sure they don’t miss the nuances of a conversation. Yet, the actual work when it comes to inclusion is on the company, its leadership and the company culture they foster. Technology can still lend a hand like People Insights, a new feature Webex provides that shares anonymized data around meetings. Managers can see if a conversation was monopolized by a few or everybody was offered an opportunity to contribute. They can also gauge whether, as a manager, they are spending equal time across their team or even the difference between the people who are in a given team and those who actually collaborate with each other most often.
More organizations are putting their employees first and investing in them by providing them with proper tools to do their job and consider their wellbeing, not just their productivity. I wrote in the past about the negative impact of back-to-back meetings and why every organization must be mindful of the strain that comes from spending endless hours in video meetings and how to enable their people to reset. Webex partnered with Thrive Global to integrate into Webex some of its tools to build new habits to improve wellbeing and mental resilience.
There is no question in my mind that this focus on people must remain. We can argue on how hybrid work will materialize across different organizations. Still, I am confident that the effectiveness of a collaboration tool will have to be measured by how it will positively impact employee engagement and satisfaction. This is why Microsoft and Citrix had already made moves on providing “people insights” tools and Microsoft tightly integrated Viva with Microsoft Teams.
Cisco is certainly investing in its own people. The new Webex rebrand, with the logo representing two hands coming together to form a lower case “W,” seems to be a strong message to their customers and partners that when all is said and done, collaboration only thrives when people can come together without barriers, technical or otherwise.
Disclosure: The Heart of Tech is a research and consultancy firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this column. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this column.
