Why choose anything but the gold-standard for communication? Cisco Webex

Certain companies operate in the IT space which represent the gold standard of their particular product area. Sometimes, there’s just a single name that springs to mind (think “search engine” and you don’t think “Bing”!), and sometimes there are several clear market-leaders who set the standards: for cloud computing, one might think AWS, Azure and Google.

That go-to name changes over time. In the 1980s, high-end desktop PCs’ standards and reliability were epitomized by IBM, who sold their hardware business years ago. And, where once the talk was of Lotus 1-2-3 or WordPerfect, Microsoft Office now dominates.

One name that continues to represent the gold standard in security and reliability is Cisco: if you’re serious about building your business, you build using Cisco products. Therefore, it’s no surprise that many thousands of companies each day, all over the world, turn to Cisco for the best available platform in the communications market space.

Since great swathes of the world had to work remotely from the beginning of 2020, and businesses everywhere suddenly found themselves with scattered workforces and resources, the Cisco Webex platform has been used because it’s proved to be the most reliable, professional, and scalable multichannel comms and collaboration platform.

Excelling in omnichannel

The beauty of the Webex suite of products is that the depth of engineering in each application shows its quality. Everything from virtual event management, messaging, voice, video calling and online meetings, have been carefully explored and assimilated into each area of the platform. And those features built with assiduous attention to detail are available to every organization, from the smallest start-up to the largest multinational. The way the platform works corresponds with how people like to do business, not forcing them to adopt ways dictated by the system, just to communicate or collaborate.

To take a single example: in a virtual meeting, any attendee can (using whatever device they have on hand) share their screen without assuming the host’s role or having to jump out of the application and move to another platform or device. That places control in the hands of the platform’s users, as does the ability for meetings to be recorded locally, and if required, shared in the cloud. And to get action points distributed, the contents can be transcribed automatically in the cloud, and shared – all on the same platform.

The ways that business professionals work today are reflected but improved upon. Rather than hop from application to application, platform to platform, the Webex suite integrates with a huge range of legacy tools, apps, and services. Meetings and schedules can be pushed and pulled across different platforms (Microsoft, Google Calendars, and so on), so the watchwords are efficiency of purpose, ease of use, and rock-solid reliability.

Source: Cisco Webex

The onus is firmly on both allowing frictionless collaboration and communication yet retaining a cast-iron security infrastructure that prevents unwanted meeting attendants. There’s little danger of losing priceless intellectual property, or even losing face in front of key accounts or during an important pitch. Dropped video channels are more than toe-curling: they can make critical differences to the business’s growth.

Group magic

When teams come together, they share their inspiration, ideas, materials, and concepts – sometimes in the form of documents, or sometimes in virtual brainstorming sessions. However, your teams work, the Cisco Webex application supports and enables, providing meeting spaces, private and public chats, file sharing, whiteboarding, and scheduling. That’s everything, in fact, that professionals need, whether they’re meeting in-person, remotely, or in the ever-changing lineups of in-house and home-based workers.

What matters is that despite changing circumstances, the core values of the organization and the quality of service remain unaffected. The reality of everyday life means that some attendees might have to switch from their home laptop to mobile when they hit the road. But with Webex, attendees can move seamlessly from platform to platform. As backup to this of course, there are full transcripts and chat histories to refer to that can be made quickly available to all, and within the same interface.

Cisco has always been about putting business first and ensuring that the infrastructure never gets in the way. It’s only with the legendary Cisco reliability and quality that companies concentrate on what they do best, not on whether their infrastructure will hold out under strain or at scale.

Securely reliable

With a greater distributed workforce and an increasing number of remote workers, one cause for concern with some collaboration platforms is security. The Webex platform was built with security baked into its DNA from the ground up, not bolted on later after security vulnerabilities arose.

As you might expect from the company whose hardware has built the world’s leading network security systems, all participants across the Webex suite are protected by enterprise-grade encryption of data. Secure meeting settings and strong passwords are set by default, helping keep video conferences protected. All messages, files, whiteboards and actions stay safe, and recordings and transcriptions are always kept in-house. That’s reassurance for both the organization, but also represents adherence to the strict data protection rules that apply to much of world, from California through to Australia.

Broad brush to detail

In the next article in this series, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into some of the particular areas of excellence from which all users of Webex benefit. Bringing together distributed workforces is more challenging now than ever before, but with  , you’ll have the right tools to support your organization’s growth and continued excellence.

Check back on these pages for more in the coming weeks to find out more about switching to the gold-standard, and visit www.webex.com for more information.