Cisco Meeting

At Cisco, we believe collaboration is not a set of technologies – it’s a human activity focused around getting teams to work better together to reach common goals.

Cisco’s mission is simple : we want to provide a no-compromise collaboration experience into Every Room, on Every Desk, and into Every Pocket. In this post I will concentrate on the Meeting Room designed by Cisco.

When it comes to Collaboration, the focus is on getting the experience right – it’s not just about IT making sure that things are deployed. If employees don’t adopt your new technologies, where’s the return on investment?

Meeting Rooms today

Currently we see a lot of meeting rooms around in business and organizations like this one, or with similar siloed technologies and usage applications. One solution for local meetings, one for audio conference, one for multimedia, one for video and one for whiteboard and content creation.

This is the typical meeting room I personally see when I visit customers. You can find an audioconference endpoint with external microphones. This audioconference device has an audio corporate directory and can be reached via a PSTN phone number. In one corner, there is a “wheel base” videoconference endpoint also with its own external microphones and a remote control. This device can be reached by dialling an H.323 IP address and also has a video corporate directory. For local meetings, you also have ceiling speakers in addition to the beamer which adds another remote control on the table. Also, fifty percent of the time this beamer has a PC connected which adds keyboard, mouse, webcam, etc.

When an end-user enters this room, the first thing which comes to its mind is “oh, my god ! It looks difficult, I’m gonna call IT to setup my meeting”. If you think about it, it’s not really obvious for most of the business users : I’d like to show my content locally but also remotely for people joining via video, which VGA cable do I use ? which remote ? which video source ? I’m doing a videoconference, but I also need to bring someone on its cell-phone, should I use the audioconference device in parallel ?

Things does not work very well together or not at all, and it is a lot of friction and pain to utilize everything in an efficient manner, and overall this creates a very bad user experience.

The Meeting Room designed by Cisco

We worked at redefining the meeting room experience, making it simpler, more user centric and optimized for user scenarios, but also more intelligent and capable, and here is the result :

Basically, we took every accessories from the previous room and integrate them into a single device : the Cisco MX Series.

The MX series integrates the beamer, the speakers, the microphones, the audio and video conference endpoints, the different cables inside a single device.