Automated Transcript
Samantha Mooney, Proposition Owner: Hi, and welcome to the Gamma and Cisco Good Together podcast. My name is Samantha Mooney, and I’m the proposition owner for UCaaS and CCaaS here at Gamma. And today I’m joined by Richard Ablitt. Would you like to introduce yourself?
Richard Ablitt, Commercial and Strategy Product Manager: Hello, yeah, I’m Richard Ablitt. I’m a Commercial and Strategy Product Manager within Gamma. I look after Cisco Webex.
Sam: Perfect, thank you. And today we are doing something exciting. You have been at Cisco Live in Amsterdam and we’re going to be discussing the updates, how it was. So yeah, where do we begin? How was it?
Richard: It was very good. It’s very much like going to Disneyland. It’s very magical, it’s very well put together. It’s very tiring—I don’t know how many steps I did—but it was a great event. I spent four days there. It was great to meet old friends, old colleagues, old people I’ve worked for and spend time just being immersed in the Cisco magic.
Sam: Makes sense. Now I know there’s probably a lot of information that you took in, a lot of updates, but what were the kind of key updates, key themes that you were seeing that we can probably kind of dive deeper into today?
Richard: So, the whole event was covering anywhere from network switching, connectivity, AI, sustainability, third party vendors, so there was quite a lot of content. We spent a lot of time going through some of the sessions—spending an hour going through specific topics. There was definitely some themes from the event. The big themes—or one of the observations I made—was around analytics and insights. As you kind of walked around the stalls and you spoke to people, most vendors were talking about analytics and insights and how they bring statistics and numbers and visualisation into their products. One of the interesting things I saw was a new Splunk box. So, you know, Cisco buying a software company ends up building a box. But the use case was very unique. So, where it was positioned was in the meeting space where they were talking about how they could power LEDs with PoE—so not having to provide power to lighting and blinds and that type of stuff. They were talking about meeting rooms having room bars and very good equipment with sensors in. But your office space isn’t just meeting rooms. So, the data around those sensors from meeting rooms, you don’t get outside the meeting room. So, they’ve created this Splunk box where it collects those statistics, and then what it’s doing is providing that information into Splunk. So, you’re starting to see this—where Cisco bought Splunk—you’re starting to see how they’re using Splunk within all aspects of their portfolio and starting to join it. So, I’m quite excited for that journey that they’re going to go over the next three years around bringing together collaboration and networking and Splunk and security into one ecosystem.
Sam: Absolutely. And how does that tie in—because I know that they’ve got the kind of—is it the workplace designer? So that they can help optimise the spaces in the meeting rooms. So does that Splunk—does that come into when we’re creating the meeting rooms and how we’re deciding what equipment is the best for that meeting room?
Richard: Yeah, so I saw lots of different types of meeting spaces and designs. The meeting room designer is really quite a cool product and it’s evolving at quite a fast pace. And what I like about it is, you look at the Cisco meeting room devices—the bars—and how easy they are to install. But AV has traditionally been quite complicated to design and install. That’s less so. But where Cisco are positioning the meeting room experience is about how you create the right environment, the right setup. So, in one of the sessions, we were looking at how the microphones position—in terms of how many microphones, where the microphones are, what that experience is going to be like for the end person on that meeting, how that links to the seating, microphone setup, and how you position that. One of the things you have to consider in meeting rooms is: where do I put stuff? What do I need? Do I need longer cables? And it was really quite interesting to see how they really thought about not only the hardware that you need in a meeting room, but also the user experience of that hardware and how you make sure you’re selecting the right things. Some of the things I hadn’t really considered is, you know, if you buy desk-based microphones, that’s—you’re hardwired and that’s your one and only setup you’ve got. But with the ceiling microphone, you can now reorganise a space and not have to worry about where your microphones are. You’ve got the right microphone, and the right number of them. So having that designer to help you enforce some of those design rules, make the right selection, and not do designing by trial and error or not putting in the bare minimum to just be good enough—but to make sure you’re designing it for the right experience and the right users.
Sam: Yeah, that is actually a really interesting point. And something that you mentioned earlier that I find quite interesting was about—did you say the integrations with these other partners like Microsoft, Zoom—how the equipment can be integrated with Cisco’s, so it’s a very seamless experience. Which I think, you know, when a customer comes and they might have multiple—or they might have legacy technology that they still want to use while they’re kind of on their journey—Cisco equipment can integrate with that, am I right in thinking that?
Richard: Yeah, correct. So, you know, Cisco devices don’t just work on Webex. They’ve just released a new device called Bring Your Own Device. So, it’s a room bar—it’s basically a Room Bar Pro without the touch panel or the in-room navigator. What that allows you to do is just plug your USB in and use anything. So, you just walk into a room, plug in USB-C, and start sharing your content. And it’s a microphone, speaker, and camera all in one unit. What it then allows you to do is you can then plug it into your LAN, so you’ve now got manageability of that device. And then if you plug in a navigator, it now turns that device into a richer experience—more of a Room Bar Pro experience. And then you can also then now activate that within the Control Hub, so you get the manageability, the serviceability, the analytics of it. But they don’t just stop there. There were long sessions around what they do with Teams integration, Zoom integration, Google integration. What I like about Cisco devices is you’re not constrained to one meeting platform. I use two or three of those a week depending on what customers and partners I’m talking to. So, to be able to walk in a room and just join that meeting is quite key for me. But what Cisco’s also doing with people like Zoom and Microsoft is evolving that join experience. And there was a lot of techy stuff—CRCs and CVIs and SIP registration—but no one really cares about that. So, what Cisco is doing is managing the complexity of all that technical detail, so a person just has to click “join” and they’re into the meeting and able to benefit from the best experience of that meeting. So, they were talking about—most of these things join by WebRTC, but they’re looking to make it join by SIP. They’ve worked really hard at reducing license costs and CVI dependencies, so that was really cool. And then you’ve got the Webex experience. And what I really liked was their devices allow all of their tech and innovation and R&D—but the way they’ve constructed it from a technology point of view means that you can be joining a Microsoft Teams meeting but all of the cool camera positions and headshots and all that stuff just becomes part of your meeting experience. You don’t get that in Teams today, but you get that on Cisco hardware. And I really found that quite interesting. Even down to things like—we were on the Microsoft Teams demo and they had the ability to kind of swipe out a pop-out where you then could have your app. So, you can join your Lucidchart or your ServiceNow—you can even generate a ServiceNow ticket if you’ve got a problem. And I found that quite interesting, how they’re innovating that experience of joining—not just the hardware, but how people interact and what they’re doing within those meetings.
Sam: That is interesting. And talking about meetings—because I’ve seen some of the updates from Cisco Live—was about AI in meeting rooms. Now we’ve obviously got the AI-driven meetings, got the better integrations, we’ve talked about the devices. And I think this is kind of where we can really be adding value to our clients by helping them kind of optimise their setups and integrate these AI features and help them adopt. In your experience, how do we do this for clients? Like how is it that we are helping them from start to finish get set up in the best way—it might not just be meeting rooms like you’re saying it’s the way that they’re kind of interacting with each other in different teams?
Richard: Yeah, so one of the things I got quite excited about was a thing called CrossView. So typically, in a meeting room you’d have a camera at the end of a table, a screen, and you have rows of people. And they would either do this, where we’re talking, but the people on the end, all they’re going to see is my receding hairline and my growing holiday weight—which isn’t great for their experience. You and me are having a great time because we’re in person, but they’re just seeing the side of my head.
So, what CrossView allows you to do is they’ve got cameras kind of down the side of the rooms now. So, as I talk, it focuses on me, and then if you were to talk, it would focus on you. So that person who’s remote is now seeing your voice and your facial expressions instead of just the side of your head. And it’s tracking who’s speaking and when they’re speaking. But also, it can also show the group view as well as the individual speaker view. And it was also cool things where if you have two people sitting together—depending on how far and how close they are away—if you’re far away it would focus on you as an individual, but if I were to stick my arm out, my arm wouldn’t come in as a side view. But if I got close enough, it would then do a frame of two people. So, this kind of interaction where you haven’t got to kind of manually control something to make that work was really quite cool. And you can see how the kind of camera positions and the speaker positions and the desk setup and the room designer is really helping people understand how to create a great experience. And that’s why I think, you know, Gamma—working with Gamma in terms of helping them buy the devices, provide the licenses, provide the services and the support—is really quite key for them.
Sam: Absolutely. Perfect. So enough about meetings, what else did you think a key takeaway was? What else are we kind of discussing we should be focusing on?
Richard: Yeah, so you kind of mentioned on the AI. AI was a big, big thing for Cisco. So, the keynote—there was a lot of announcements around AI. The keynote was focusing on what Cisco are doing with AI. The first thing I found really interesting was what they’re doing from a data centre and a network perspective. So, they have designed and launched almost like AI compute in a box, I called it—or in a rack. So being able to put your GPUs and your compute and your storage into one place and grow and expand, reducing that barrier to get into AI. But also, what they started to do is look at how they can embed AI into different parts of the network. So, in the security section, for example, they were talking about how traditional networks would have a firewall at the edge, and you would manage traffic inside and outside of that network. But now they’re looking at taking those workloads and putting them into virtual machines on switches, on routers, within the network—so being able to move some of those workloads around that kind of estate. And why was that important? Because AI is going to change the security posture of organisations now. There were some statistics around how concerned people are becoming about AI and how powerful it is, and what new security risks and profiles it can bring to an organisation, and how people are going to have to change how they mitigate that. One of the other areas they were talking about was AI assistants. So, we have AI assistants in the Webex Control Hub and in the Webex app, and now that’s being brought into a lot of those other tools. So, you saw AI assistants being populated in security and networking and in their tools and AppDynamics. So, they’re really pushing that AI integration story and figuring out how they join that up.
Sam: That is important, because like you’re saying, with that AI technology is coming AI security threats—so you’re needing AI security defence, almost, to counteract.
Richard: Yeah, and it’s also the sovereignty of that, right? So, where data is being stored, where it’s being shared, who is it being shared with, what people are doing with it. Should they allow that information to be stored in an AI system? But also, the benefits of AI in terms of how it can help with smart agents, for example. So traditional contact centres were voice-based, IVR-type driven, but now AI can be used for kind of a conversational model—an intelligent one. So with very little programming now, you can create a smart agent that you can feed a knowledge base into, then you can ask it natural language questions and it will respond like a human. And those kinds of use cases I think will be quite powerful for people in the future.
Sam: Absolutely. And then as a managed service provider, having those experts who can guide customers through that journey—because it is exciting, there’s so much out there, but there is that scare about what the risks are. So yeah, having those experts to guide them and say okay, what are your business challenges? What are your pain points? How can this technology help that? And what do you need to kind of be careful of? Yeah, something you said about how they’re talking about the networks—it kind of leads me on to the Wi-Fi 7 stuff. Because I know now, you know, it’s not about being faster, it’s about being more intelligent, more reliable. And with all of this networks plus the automation stuff and AI on top of it, like having a solid network is critical nowadays. And I guess that Wi-Fi 7—is that supposed to kind of help that?
Richard: Yeah. As AI comes into the workload, the demand on data goes up tenfold. So having a network—through Wi-Fi, through LAN, through switching—is really important now. In terms of everyone is going to be connecting to AI for something, somewhere, somehow. So being able to manage that—not just at a traffic level. So, you know, Wi-Fi 7 was about speed and being able to deal with that. And speed was a big thing of them trying to get ahead. So, they announced some things like 800 gig networks. I’m trying to work out how many zeroes it is. They showed the diagram of being able to connect from Spain to I think it was the Netherlands and a bit further through fibre optics. And that’s because the demand on data and security and networking is going to grow with the use of AI, because people will be embedding it more into their business applications, their processes and their workflows, and will need to connect to AI engines and data sources and all that sort of stuff.
Sam: Okay, so any more exciting takeaways or updates that you got from the event?
Richard: There was—I spent a lot of time around looking at ThousandEyes. So, I went to quite an in-depth technical session and looked at their products. I’ve spent some time looking at ThousandEyes in the past, but what I was really quite blown away with is how easy it is to set up. And how you can definitely see a synergy between ThousandEyes, Splunk, and collaboration. So, the benefits of being able to have a meeting, have a call, and look at the troubleshooting and look at where that problem is. You know, traditional telephony—especially as people work from home—and go, “I’m having a quality issue” or “having a problem.” When they ring up their support desk, where is that? Is it their home network? Is it somewhere out in the big wide web? Is it in the cloud providers? So, that was really quite interesting to see how you can get real-time statistics. So, we can literally be having a meeting and I can look at the experience of that user, but also find out where it’s causing that problem. And being able to set that for different tests as well. So, I can do anything from Webex to containers and APIs and stuff I didn’t really understand, and it was very complicated—but the metrics it gave you and the way it visualised it, I think that’s quite powerful in terms of how people can understand where their networks are, where their problems are.
Sam: Makes sense. Fab. Well, that’s all the kind of updates I had. Anything else to share?
Richard: No, that was it. That was a lot.
Sam: Perfect. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. So, thank you for joining us on the first episode of Gamma and Cisco: Good Together Podcast. See you on the next one.
