The office. Oh, I'm good right here. I'm all about the office. This is my workspace.
We want our workforce to be productive and happy in every workspace. It's been years since I've been on site. How am I supposed to navigate the new setup?
Have they even updated those old meeting rooms? Hey, WebEx, start my meeting.
Everyone gets their own perfect workspace and they can interact the way they'd like to. What kind of workspace would I even get?
That was easy. There's so many distractions at home. I can only focus here.
Can you hear me? Okay. Yeah, I can only hear you remote. I may not be seen or heard. Oh, hey, maybe not. You just don't get tools like this at home.
Sure you do. When you're on the go, moving a meeting is difficult. Wow, I didn't know you could do that.
They're getting the support they need. And we know our IP is secure. Are you okay? Who are you talking to?
It's all right here in real time. Our entire workforce, user, app, and device management. We even set them up with teleworker gateways that have VPN, Wi-Fi, and cellular failover if the internet goes down.
Oo, virtual concierge. Nice touch. We've created intelligent, flexible, and secure workspaces so our awesome teams can do their very best work.
Welcome, welcome, welcome everyone. I'm so excited to be here for our third WebEx event. You know, last year we said that the future of work was going to be hybrid and we talked a lot about how we're going to be working in this mixed mode. Now, since then, frankly, a lot has changed. You've been putting strategies and policies in place for how your employees are going to work. And a recent study showed that about 30% of the organizations are actually mandating a return to the office for their people. But more than half of the companies are making it completely voluntary. And so they're giving their employees flexibility and choice in when they work, how they work, when they come in, how often, so on and so forth. But regardless of whether you've mandated or made it optional, the reality is people aren't coming into work as much. And frankly, free pizza can only take you so far. And so the question you might ask is why is that? And it's because for a lot of companies, hybrid work simply isn't working. The fact is hybrid work is different and harder than when most people worked in the office or when most people worked remotely. It would be a shame, frankly, to revert back to the way that all of us worked pre-pandemic because we'd lose out so much on the gains we've actually made when we were all working from home. And then we learned how to be more inclusive, how to remove barriers around geography and language and attract new talent from all parts of the world to make sure it's much more of a global economy. And this progressed society in some very profound ways. But as we go into this mixed mode, everything will need to be reimagined. We need to rethink our patterns of work, the role of the office, how to maintain a company culture, how leaders engage and build high performing teams in a mixed mode era. So the question is how do we actually solve this problem. So one thing we know is that it cannot be solved in isolation by any single team. We have to solve it as a cross-functional undertaking. So for example, IT teams need to think through the significant technology changes that they need to manage and support. Human resources teams need to address cultural shifts and improve inclusivity and well-being for employees no matter where they work. And facilities teams need to deal with the fact that building occupancy might be lower now. They need to get more creative about the role of the office and get smarter about space allocation. They need to address health and safety concerns and meet sustainability goals. So what we need to do is solve for hybrid work in a holistic way because it can't be solved with collaboration software alone. It also needs devices, reliable connectivity and networking and security to protect intellectual property all working together in concert. And we need to solve it for different types of workers as well because they all have different needs. When people think about hybrid work, frankly, they're often thinking about knowledge workers. But we can't forget about the frontline and field workers like healthcare professionals, first responders, utility workers, or even people working in operations like customer service centers or claims processing. And what we'd love to do over the next two days is share with you some of the amazing innovations that our teams have been working on across all of these dimensions that I just talked about. And we'll show you how we're helping our customers with three key priorities that they have. Number one, fundamentally reimagine the workspaces everywhere because this is a really big factor on how fluid hybrid work experiences can be. Second, really help enable flexible work styles because different people and different jobs have different requirements. There's simply no single way of working across the board. And third, make sure that hybrid work environments are secure and manageable for IT. So, let's dig in and talk about each of these a little bit more.
First, like I said, organizations need to fundamentally reimagine workspaces. Now, here's a staggering statistic. 98% of all meetings will have at least one participant that's not in the same physical location as everyone else. But what's really interesting is that only 6% of the meeting rooms globally are currently video enabled. That's a huge disconnect that needs to be addressed. So let's start by doing this by rethinking the office itself. Offices frankly may look very different in the future and also serve a very different function. People may come into the office more for collaborating with one another and stay at home more for focused heads down work. This means that offices will need a new conference room setup. There'll be new huddle rooms, new ideation spaces, and they can't just be designed for the people in the room because of the statistic I just mentioned. They also need to be optimized and designed for the people that are not in the room so that no one feels left out and everyone feels included. Now, organizations may not see the need to provide dedicated desks in the office. They might find better ways to utilize expensive real estate. There will be more open shared spaces as well as hot desk configurations. And homes are now an extension of the campus. We've all had experiences working from home. Some people are lucky enough to have a dedicated home office. Some people want to work in a kitchen or others have to work in a room with shared distractions. To make this experience better, people need a new category of devices that are video devices that can reduce the friction and make them feel more immersed in communication because working while hunched over a laptop, frankly, for 8 to 10 hours a day is no way to live life. And sometimes people need the flexibility to be able to work from anywhere, whether it's in a car or in a coffee shop or at the kids' soccer practice and so on. So, I'm so excited to share some of our innovation that the team has done in providing an amazing array of devices for all of these workspaces. You know, just like Amazon had built purpose-built devices like the Kindle for reading a book, we have purpose-built devices to help you engage in any workspace. Now, for the office, we offer devices for every configuration of meeting spaces. Whether you're using a Board Pro to foster creativity or a Room Kit or a Panorama system, they all provide a great experience for the people in the room, but more importantly also the people not in the room. And all of these are also calling endpoints. So you can use these devices to make a phone call. How cool is that? And for open office configurations and hoteling, we have hot desking devices, phones and headsets. Now people can go up to any available desk, reserve it, make it their own and stay productive even when there are distractions around them. And the beauty over here is IT and facilities teams, they get the telemetry to understand which spaces are reserved, which ones are available, and how often they're being utilized. Now for homes, we offer desk devices, cameras, headsets, teleworker gateways, and so much more. Now, our devices don't just provide high-quality video. I personally think they provide magical quality video, but they also provide great spatial audio and cameras that follow you so that you can get up and move around and not feel like you're stuck to a chair. These are the kinds of features that make the fatigue factor go down so dramatically. And for working from anywhere, we have a range of devices, including wireless phones. These are purpose-built devices for frontline workers and field workers who are working in demanding physical environments. But you know what? That's not it. In every one of our devices, we're taking advantage of our massive investments in AI and machine learning to deliver the most immersive and inclusive experience possible. Let me just give you a few examples of this. Sound and acoustics management is the first. It's really important to have great sound and acoustics management for effective communications. We use audio intelligence to remove the background noise and to optimize the voice of the participants. We're also able to minimize distractions and make sure that everyone can be heard clearly. And just like sound and acoustics management, another area is this notion of nonverbal communications, which is so important for our day-to-day communications. And it's really important in how we connect with each other. That's why we use camera intelligence features like people focus to zero in on individuals in a room so that when a group of people are spread across a room in a conference room at varying distances from the cameras, the people that are not in the room can see everyone's facial expressions and body language and that way everyone feels more connected and no one feels like a second-class participant that's kind of feeling disconnected from the room. And the third area that's really important is language. We believe that language should not be a barrier to effective communications. That's why we have a real-time translation and transcription engine with more than 120 different languages. Now, the fact of the matter is we've got thousands of such features, but despite all these great innovations, we know that the world doesn't revolve around Cisco. Most organizations will use multiple collaboration solutions just like we all use multiple streaming services at home. In fact, our own research shows that 85% of the companies use two or more platforms daily. That's why over the past few years, we've invested so heavily in interoperability with other platform providers like Microsoft and Google and Zoom. So we can deliver a consistent and seamless user experience on our devices, no matter what collaboration platform people use. With just one click, you can get into any of these platforms and we've completely abstracted away the complexity. But there's one more thing. Those platforms don't just work with our devices. Frankly, they work better on our devices. All of our investments that we've made on audio intelligence, camera intelligence, calendar integration, what we've done is we've moved them to the hardware level so that those can then be applied to any of the platforms that are being accessed by that hardware. And we know that a lot of our customers are also committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. And so for them, we're going beyond interoperability. We've recently announced that our Cisco devices will now support Microsoft Teams Rooms experiences natively. So if you're using our room and desk devices, you'll be able to choose whether you want to have a WebEx experience or you want to have a native Microsoft Teams Room experience. This way you can use our devices to make the Microsoft experience even better. Let's see what this looks like.
You never have to choose again. Get Microsoft Teams and Webex together on Cisco devices. Take advantage of advanced AI technology with optimized camera views, people focus, and audio intelligence. All manageable on Control Hub or Microsoft Teams admin console running natively on the Cisco devices you love.
Now, as you can see, we're bringing world-class artificial intelligence of Cisco devices together with Microsoft Teams to provide a fantastic native experience for our joint customers in a way that the world's never seen before. Now, we're truly changing the way that the industry handles multiple meetings platforms. And to talk a little bit more about that, I thought we'd invite a very special guest, Jeff Teper from Microsoft, to join us. Hey, Jeff. How are you?
Good, you too. How are you?
Good. I was just talking about our partnership and it's great to have you on Webex One. Tell us a little bit about, from your perspective, how are you thinking about the partnership? Why is this good for you and your customers?
Well, it's great to be here and thanks for having us. And I'm making this call to you on one of the brand new Cisco Teams Rooms devices, which is a great experience. And yes, this is, I think, an incredible partnership for our customers to have Cisco join the ecosystem of certified Teams Rooms devices, and we're really excited to work with you on that innovation for our mutual customers.
Now we're excited as well. Your team has been great, by the way, in partnering with us with our engineering teams. And what I thought we'd do is there's no good keynote that goes without a demo. And so we figured since you're here, why don't we show a demo? And if you were here, Jeff, at my home, I would be making you a smoothie because I'm the world's best at making smoothies. Now, this is a self-proclaimed title, but I just want to let you know that I'm really good at it.
I would love to take you up on that and do some judging, but we'll have to settle for a virtual smoothie.
I guess you're going to have to just take my word for it this time around. So, we've got this smoothie maker. We've already blended all the pieces based on my recipe. So, I'm just going to turn this on over here right now for a second. And you know what I wanted to do was actually... GT, oh, you can't hear me. Sorry. We didn't have our noise removal turned on, but now you see that the blender is going on.
Wow. But you're able to talk to me and the background noise has been filtered.
And you know, I wanted to actually use a hair dryer, but I didn't have the raw ingredients to go out and use a hair dryer, so I figured I'd do a smoothie.
We've got the smoothie in place.
Yeah, that's impressive AI to cancel that kind of noise in the background. It's great to see. Is there other things you wanted to show in this device? Because it really is a great experience.
In fact, I wanted to say one quick thing, Jeff, which is the reason we're able to do this is because we've moved a lot of our innovation and capabilities for AI into the hardware layer so that we can apply to Microsoft Teams and now Microsoft Teams experience gets better when they're using Cisco devices. So, we're really excited across the board. Now, I think your team was going to join as well, right? And we were going to kind of show you a couple other features as well.
Yeah, we've got a couple members of our team. Sonia and Ilya have been working very closely with you on this partnership and they're here with me now.
By the way, we love Ilya and Sonia. These two people have actually been a delight to work with. So, thank you Ilya and Sonia for everything that you do. But right now, what we see is a joint view of all three of you. And imagine this being a conference room where people are actually in, you know, kind of different locations. How can we turn on frames so that you can see a much more focused view of each one of you? So, why don't you turn on frames on your end? There you go. And now I see zoomed in views and I'm actually able to see a much more utilized view of the real estate of the screen because I see each one of you as though you're on CNN.
That's impressive. The amount of unnecessary space that's cut out so you're focused on it is really, you know, that's terrific work and it's going to make every Teams meeting on this device just a lot more engaging and enjoyable. I think I guess I got to ask you is when will we be able to bring this to our mutual customers? I'm very excited. We've had a lot of excitement since the joint announce. When will it be available?
So, we're excited about this. So, there will be about six devices that we'll have made available with this capability in the beginning of the calendar year. And if you as a customer have any of these six devices already, you'll just get a software update and you'll be able to get them. And then I'm hoping, Jeff, that this is going to be a continued partnership where we continue to keep making sure that our products work better and better together over time.
No, absolutely. Us too. I mean, because we're delivering a lot of the innovation from the cloud on Teams, we'll be able to add new capabilities to the existing devices as well as working with you very closely on next generation hardware as well. We're excited about that.
Jeff, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show and thank you again, Ilya and Sonia, for everything that you've done for us and we're excited about the partnership as we move forward.
Thank you so much, G2, and enjoy the rest of your event.
Thank you. Take care. Next to tell us a bit more about how the Microsoft Teams integration actually works, plus some other exciting device announcements that we have, let's pass it over to Snora, who's our SVP of devices, and he's going to join us from the hybrid work experience center. Take it away, Snora.
Thanks, G2. It's good to be here. I'm in the hybrid experience center at Cisco headquarters. Together with Microsoft, we're bringing inclusive experiences to our mutual customers anywhere they work with a full portfolio of Microsoft Teams rooms devices for the boardroom all the way to the spare bedroom. Beginning at the office, our first wave of certified devices, the Board Pro, the Roombar, and the Roomkit Pro are available early 2023 and support collaboration in any office space from small ideation spaces to large conference rooms. Four personal devices will be certified for Microsoft Teams, the Desk Pro, Desk Camera 4K, and two headsets, enabling hybrid work from anywhere. In our surveys, 88% of workers were frustrated with in-office experiences, especially in large rooms. In-office participants can be difficult to see in a virtual meeting. So, we are re-imagining the large conference room experience. Check it out.
Introducing Roomkit EQ. We took the magic of Cisco devices and made it even bigger. An industry first of its kind in supporting large spaces, the EQ is our most powerful collaboration device yet. It's the industry's most capable AI and machine learning platform to support inclusive hybrid experiences. Based on the powerful NVIDIA processor, the Roomkit EQ keeps every participant equally framed with the potential to provide even more advanced room analytics like object detection and background replacement. Connecting up to three screens and multiple microphones, cameras, and other room accessories, the Roomkit EQ lets you customize your setup to make large spaces even more engaging, and best yet is orderable from November. We want everyone to have this experience, so the Roomkit EQ will be optimized for native WebEx and Microsoft Teams rooms devices.
We know that re-imagined hybrid experiences must be extended beyond the conference room. If just one remote participant is difficult to see or hear, the whole thing can be disrupted. The only way to get hybrid work right on one end of a meeting is to get it right on both ends. So, the Cisco Desk Series is purpose-built to make hybrid work work in any personal space. Look and sound your best in meetings with HD video and a camera that follows you. Be more productive with digital whiteboarding and co-creation from anywhere. Simply swipe up to access your video calls, content, and applications. And do all of this stress-free. The Desk Series is ergonomically friendly and gives users a one-button-to-join experience. Whether you're transforming the personal desk experience or the conference room, rich insight can inform your decisions. Webex Control Hub gives you an inventory overview and state of affairs for each of your workspaces. Understand peak occupancy hours, the most utilized workspaces. Learn the why behind these trends. You'll gain rich data that allows you to monitor and use your resources efficiently. As you are making informed decisions, we want to help you build the best possible workplace experiences. So, we are sharing our best practices with details and examples from real workspaces in Cisco's Penn One office in New York. Access our design ebooks to get details about our devices, networking, and even our lighting and furniture decisions. Ciscowide, we are building sustainability directly into our strategy. We're monitoring and using spaces efficiently to meet our net zero goals with smart power modes and sensors built into our devices. And everything from the power connections to the materials we use have sustainability in mind. Take the Roombar for example. It has recyclable packaging, uses less materials to build and is designed to be easily refurbished and repaired with devices that consume less energy and less materials. Together we can power hybrid work sustainably. Back to you, G2.
Hey, thank you, Snora. Really impressive what the team is delivering with our incredible devices. But, you know, we recognize that devices need to be part of a much broader ecosystem of workspace technology. And I've invited my good friend Jonathan Davidson out to talk more about this and to share how we're using the entirety of the Cisco portfolio to deliver the most modern, the most optimized, and the most sustainable workspaces. So welcome, Jonathan.
Thank you, G2. We know that our customers are investing in infrastructure, security, software and devices that will power business for the next decade and we bring the full power of our engineering organization to solve those problems holistically. The workplace has changed forever. The new way of working has shown that attendance is no longer a proxy for productivity. Employees need a purpose to go to the workplace. They need a great experience to draw them back into the office. Never have we seen such a seismic shift in the very definition of going to work. In fact, 96% of employees say that they need their workspace to get smarter. They want to come to the workplace to build connections with their colleagues, peers, and friends for collaboration and for celebration. We need to create environments for them to not only boost productivity but also foster serendipitous connections. We must transform our existing physical spaces to stay relevant in the era of hybrid work. Simply put, our workspaces need to get smarter, safer, sustainable, and seamless. And Cisco Spaces is our cloud platform that does just that. Let's roll a quick video to see what Cisco Spaces can do to modernize your office experience.
Hey there, hybrid worker. It's kind of a whole new work environment these days, which calls for some updated rules of etiquette. Luckily, the interactive Cisco rich map can help you find everything important like conference rooms. Smart workspaces let you know which areas might have better air quality and less people. So no matter if you are working at the office or in charge of it, Cisco Smart Workspaces is helping to make your workplace work a little harder for you.
Cisco Spaces is already delivering hybrid work at scale with massive success. It is currently deployed across 220,000 locations worldwide, managing over 7 billion square feet of enterprise space. So, are you ready to turn your offices into smart workspaces? Cisco Spaces is available for you today. The awesome thing about Cisco Spaces is that it allows the three most important stakeholders to create the best experiences for workspaces in every enterprise. For employees who want to connect, collaborate, and celebrate safely while they're in the office. For facilities and real estate teams who need data to optimize and redesign their workspaces. And for IT teams who need to make hybrid work work inclusively at scale across their global locations. Let's take a look at what Cisco Spaces can do for employees. It starts with a superior experience using 3D rich maps built by Cisco where you can now visualize and locate points of interest like meeting rooms, desks, elevators, cafes, and restrooms. Now you can locate meeting rooms and desks on a 3D map. Check if they're occupied and then reserve them if they are not. That's better productivity. And with real-time occupancy and air quality updates, employees are equipped with critical information about their workspace, avoiding frustrations and improving safety. For facilities and real estate teams, Cisco Spaces offers real-time data and historical views to help simplify the complexity of reconfiguring and redesigning workspaces. For example, they can measure and visualize space occupancy and utilization over a 3D map. They can monitor environmental alerts and energy consumption and they can extend all of this data outside of Cisco Spaces into third-party apps and data lakes for more advanced analytics. Lastly, the best thing about Cisco Spaces is that it is approved by IT. Over 10,000 IT users use Cisco Spaces today. It's secure, scalable, and offers 24/7 monitoring and support. It also lets IT teams find and locate high-value assets like iPads and laptops in your workspace for loss prevention. And it offers an open sensor framework through which IT teams can onboard, manage and monitor third-party sensors, leveraging their existing Cisco network without the need for overlays. Did you know that your Cisco network can act as a powerful sensor? Cisco Spaces combines the power of Catalyst, Meraki and Webex infrastructure. When you activate Cisco Spaces, you are activating your existing Cisco investments. Your Catalyst APs, switches, Meraki APs, Meraki things, Webex room devices, Navigators, Desk Pros, all of them become sensors for occupancy, air quality, temperature, humidity, noise, and more. On top of the awesome native capabilities that Cisco Spaces provides, we have an open ecosystem that enables third-party ISVs and device vendors to come together and deliver value to customers on top of our platform. This ecosystem of nearly 100 partner apps and devices includes a wide range of use cases from employee experience, workspace management, smart building management, analytics and insights to Bluetooth and IoT sensors. These partners are pre-integrated and tested. We have done all the hard work. So, all you have to do is turn on the partner apps. In the era of hybrid work, a building's effectiveness and productivity is defined by how smart, sustainable, safe, and seamless it is. With Cisco Spaces, your buildings won't fall behind. Working in the office is just one half of hybrid work. Let's talk about working from home. We know that the network is fundamental to hybrid work experiences. In fact, we have a fun little demo to show you right now.
Hey Jordan, thanks for joining the call so we can showcase a Meraki-powered home office. When you're working from home, you need a stable, trusted connection no matter what. And that is where the Meraki platform and teleworker devices like the MX67C deliver a secure, always-on, resilient networking environment. Because if you can't connect, you can't collaborate. Not only does the MX67C get teleworkers up and running seamlessly, but built-in cellular failover ensures that if your primary connection goes down, the apps you need to collaborate with remain available like WebEx. When things go wrong, and they will, visibility is critical. Let's look at how we can diagnose what happened in the Meraki dashboard. What you can see here in the dashboard is the MX67 failing over. Its primary WAN connection went down and the device automatically picked up the traffic on its secondary cellular connection. We can even see the live cellular traffic flowing through the MX over here. Not bad. Jordan, am I coming through?
All right, fantastic. When the WebEx experience is powered by Cisco, managing collaboration at scale is so much better. Connectivity is great, but when there's a problem, it needs the visibility to address it because you can't fix what you can't see. The integration of ThousandEyes end-to-end path insight into WebEx Control Hub empowers IT to proactively identify where issues may occur all from one place, whether it's with the ISP, in the network, or with the application. It's incredibly powerful. We want to make it simple for IT to operate their networks and applications because if the IT experience suffers, the user experience suffers and nobody but Cisco can provide this level of visibility, insight and action. Hybrid work must be simple for users which requires a holistic approach that Cisco is committed to deliver. It takes a powerful secure network, a suite of devices and software to help us connect and full visibility into what's happening no matter where employees are working. With the breadth of the Cisco portfolio, Cisco Spaces plus WebEx plus Catalyst plus Meraki plus ThousandEyes and more, we are helping businesses modernize for the future. To all of you attending Webex One, thank you for being here with us. I am honored to be working alongside G2's team and there's so much more innovation coming your way.
Hey, thanks, Jonathan. Really appreciate your partnership, my friend. Now, in addition to reimagining workspaces, organizations also need to support flexible work styles. And frankly, that's because there's no single way of working that applies across the board for every type of worker. All interactions are simply not created equal. There's a whole spectrum of different interaction types and they vary in scale and in stakes. You need to support everything from a one-on-one phone call to a small meeting up to the largest events with hundreds of thousands of people. And with the WebEx suite, we're providing an amazing portfolio of capabilities that support all of these different interaction types. What I mean by that is you get calling, messaging, meetings, whiteboarding, webinars, events, polling, Q&A, and asynchronous video all in a single suite. Each one of these capabilities is frankly not just a feature. It's a product category by itself. And many organizations use tools from multiple providers across these different areas. But with WebEx, you get it all in a single integrated suite. And it's actually a best-of-breed suite. Each one of our capabilities is best-in-class, but you don't have to buy it all individually. And frankly, they all work beautifully well together. Now, to tell us more about the power of the WebEx suite and our amazing innovations, I'd like to introduce the one and only Javeed Khan, senior vice president and general manager of our collaboration business. Welcome, Javeed.
Thank you, G2. As G2 mentioned, we designed the Webex Suite to support all of your interactions. Just announced last year, the Webex Suite is seeing phenomenal growth. And you know what? We are only getting started. That's why I'm so proud of the velocity with which our team is shipping new features and capabilities. So now we're going to walk you through some of our exciting new announcements and innovations. And I know you're going to love them. Whether you like it or not, our days revolve around meetings. When you want to meet someone one-on-one, you schedule a meeting. When you're trying to get work done with another team, you schedule a meeting. In fact, as more and more teams have become hybrid, meeting usage is increasing. And we are seeing that at WebEx. We host more than 120 billion meeting minutes annually. That means your meetings platform is still one of your most critical business tools. The Webex of today is very different from the Webex of two years ago. We are always innovating to bring new and enhanced features and functionality to make meetings more productive and inclusive. Hopefully, you've noticed that. So, let's take a look at some of my new favorite features. First, scalable grid layouts. No matter where you take a meeting from or what device you're on, you need flexibility. We have the industry's most flexible meeting layout options all at your fingertips. Our layouts let you see what you want to see, the presentation or the audience. You can either focus on the presenter or up to 81 people in a 9x9 grid. Customizable layouts from Webex let you see what you want to see. In a meeting, you now have more powerful ways to collaborate and share thanks to our new mobile camera share feature. Mobile camera view gives you the ability to share high-quality live video right from your mobile camera. This allows you to work with others on a live feed. Participants can respond, interact, and engage with this live content. You can now stream real-time situations like the frontline worker streaming all the way to the back office. This could also help a healthcare professional diagnose a medical issue with real-time streaming. Let's take a look.
Introducing a new way to share, to collaborate, to communicate visually. Mobile camera share on WebEx allows your teammates to get a real-time view of whatever you're seeing in front of you. Easily bring your meetings to life by sharing live demos, spaces, and prototypes straight from your iPhone 14 Pro. Zoom in, zoom out, annotate, and collaborate on a high-quality live video stream, unlocking timelier input, approvals, and updates live from your WebEx meetings mobile app.
Very cool stuff. Now, we also know that life happens and sometimes you miss a meeting. Of course, there are recordings after the meeting, but how many of us actually sit through an entire 60 or a 90-minute recording? You just want to get to the good stuff. We've made that easy with recent additions to our recording capabilities. As a host, you can now organize your recordings into chapters so your audience can focus on what is most important. With WebEx Assistant, there are notes, highlights, action items, speaker attribution, and much, much more. And you know what I like to do? I search the transcripts for my name, so I can find all of my action items without having to scrub through an entire hour-long meeting. Now, I'm sure none of you multitask during meetings, but if you need to, Webex works with the iOS picture-in-picture capabilities. Check your calendar, type up notes, ping a colleague. Our mobile app gives you the flexibility to work how you want. In a hybrid world, we often take the early morning meeting and then there's the rush to get out of the house, but you need to stay in that meeting. So, you try to dial in from your phone. You end up in the meeting twice and get that dreaded echo loop. And now you've interrupted that entire meeting. Suddenly, you're that person. With WebEx, that transition from home to on-the-go is easy with our move-to-mobile feature. Simply scan the QR code with your phone and your meeting is instantly transferred to your mobile phone and disconnects from the laptop. No echo loops. Now you can head out without missing a beat. Whether you're working in the field, waiting in the school pickup line, or at soccer practice, your car has become your mobile workspace. With Apple CarPlay, you can easily join meetings with safety first. Video is automatically disabled so you are in audio-only mode. We've also added support to easily listen to recordings so you can catch up on what you've missed. Now, these are just a few of the things we are excited about with the world's most advanced meetings platform. But to be realistic, we don't only do work in meetings. Work often gets done outside of meetings. That is why we've packed the WebEx suite with so many tools including messaging. For many of us, quick messages have replaced the formality of email. We also use it to connect and build relationships with our colleagues. Webex messaging keeps the discussion going outside of a meeting before, during, after. You can post agendas, share content, highlight meeting notes, access recordings. No matter what you need, messaging keeps the conversation going. And it might come as a surprise to you, but we have over a billion messages being sent on the WebEx platform every month. We've added status indicators, avatars, and GIFs to allow for a more friendly and personalized experience. You don't have to be a developer to use our messaging tool. Emojis have different skin tones, and you can also include pronouns to express your real self. In a hybrid work world, WebEx messaging helps your teams build greater community and extend your work culture, even when people are miles apart. Our new public spaces feature allows you to create and join open spaces focused on topics, tasks, or hobbies, making it easier to build a work community. Of course, there are times when we suffer from information overload, feeling like there are more messages than we can keep up with. That is why you will love our new space grouping feature. It allows you to sort and organize your messages in a way that's meaningful to you. So, we've talked about meetings and messaging. Another important part of work is ideating, working together to solve problems like defining a new process or brainstorming on a new feature or product. But how do you come up with the next big idea when the team isn't actually sitting together? Let's talk about the next workload in our WebEx suite that's designed specifically to help with this. Whiteboarding. To be fair, Webex has always had whiteboarding capabilities in our meetings. But to make whiteboarding even more powerful, we knew we had to build a consistent experience across hardware and software, especially in this new hybrid world. That is why I'm pleased to announce a new WebEx unified whiteboarding experience that we recently launched. Anyone can start or join a whiteboard and work together regardless of whether they've joined from a browser, the WebEx app, or a Cisco device. Brainstorming is easy in and out of meetings. Drag and drop, draw shapes, add sticky notes, insert images, and use the selection tool to move things around. Whiteboards can be saved and shared in the Webex space. So ideating can continue asynchronously. Let's take a look at how this works.
Collaborate and co-create anywhere using WebEx whiteboarding. Even if team members are remote, they are all able to participate equally with the WebEx whiteboarding app and Cisco Board Pro Series. Everyone can sketch, comment, and add pictures at the same time on a saved whiteboard that lives forever. And since that board lives on, anyone can access their boards from the WebEx app. Continue to ideate on your great idea. Even bring that board into another group call to polish it up.
As you just saw, Cisco is the only vendor who has a whiteboarding solution across software and hardware. With the Cisco Board Pro, which comes in both 55 and 75 inch, multiple people can co-create on a physical whiteboard. And when you want to bring in someone else remote, you can share that same whiteboard in a call or in a meeting. But many of our day-to-day interactions still start with a simple phone call. So let's bring up Sonu who will walk us through some of our amazing innovations in Webex calling.
Thanks, Javeed. Calling is one of the most important ways people communicate around the world. Think about when you need to reach a nurse urgently or need assistance for a missed flight or the package you were looking forward to is lost. You want an immediate response. You want to hear a voice saying they're here to help. Businesses count on us to provide enterprise-grade calling across industries, workflows, and verticals like healthcare, government, retail, and financial organizations. In fact, we are the undisputed leader in calling. Cisco cloud calling connects over 45 million users worldwide, serving more than 8 billion calls a month. Calls, not minutes. And WebEx calling has reached a new milestone, 7 million subscribers. We offer a truly scalable, secure, and resilient solution that everyone can count on. Over the last year, we have continued to add great features to deliver the calling experience you need for hybrid work across softphone, desk phone, and mobile device. For example, Webex Go, a game-changing mobile-first calling solution. It brings the power of fully compliant enterprise telephony to a familiar mobile device. No need for separate apps or compromise to personal identity. We are now including options to seamlessly elevate a mobile call to include video and screen sharing capabilities. And starting next month, Webex Go will be available in the UK market. The WebEx audio intelligence you love for advanced noise removal in our meetings and calling also extends to external networks and PSTN calls. So whether it's a noisy call from a cab or the factory floor using any network, all parties can always be heard clearly. I cannot stress the importance of hearing people in the moments that matter. Let's talk about a few of our latest innovations like group call management. A set of robust call queue and analytics features that elevate the performance of any inbound calling team. Advanced call routing lets you route calls based on skills, time of day, and more. It's basically a free call center. Include it at no extra cost with Webex calling. Let's look at the experience for the frontline. Webex calling with group call management can make the first call a great call for both staff and customers. A suite of features allow staff to be up and running with simple ways to log in, manage queues, optimize schedules, and provide service from almost any device that has internet access. Supervisors have tools to monitor individual and team performance to better allocate staff, help coach, and jump into a call when necessary. They can also access detailed call queue analytics, both real-time and historical, for insights on callers and agents. Customers can be connected to the best available resources with call queues based on staff skill, specialty, time of day, even location. And when things get busy, they can opt for a call back instead of being on hold. Coupled with the power of the WebEx suite, group call management provides the best out-of-the-box experience for small group support services. Webex embraces an open ecosystem to meet customers where they are. The power and innovation of Webex calling is integrated inside Microsoft Teams with a brand new user interface. Now there's no need to switch between two separate apps to utilize the power of Webex. Continuing our open ecosystem promise, Google Chrome users can now make and receive WebEx phone calls directly from the browser with one click. You get rich business calling capabilities such as call transfer, voicemail presence, and much more. In industries such as healthcare, downtime can be a matter of life and death. Our site survivability options keep you connected even during network outages with Cisco's proven networking backbone. Now you can migrate to the cloud with confidence knowing we got your back. The combined capabilities across the WebEx suite, our devices and connectivity gives you peace of mind that you're always reachable like on the frontline. Let's take a look. Downtime for the frontline can be life or death. So you need to always be up and connected. With Webex Go, your personal phone is also an enterprise-class compliant and easily managed business phone. No additional app, phones, or compromise to audio quality or personal privacy required with WebEx wireless phones plus Webex calling, messaging, and meetings. Communication is secure and designed to stay up and reliable. From ruggedized wireless gear to hot battery swaps, the WebEx wireless phones perform in the most challenging of situations. Combined with Meraki routers, plus integrated cellular backup, you can even survive unexpected network outages. I can't wait for you to...
Experience our new features. Webex Calling delivers the innovation needed to transform your business and delight your customers. Now, when you need to reach large audiences, Webex has the tools for you to drive meaningful engagement with webinars and events. To see some of the amazing functionality, I'm turning it over to Yarkin.
Thanks, Sonu. Whether it's a virtual company all hands or a multi-day in-person conference, Webex has you covered. Events and webinars are amazing ways to engage audiences, build community, and differentiate your brand. At Webex, we offer the most powerful webinar and event technology platform in the industry. From the most basic to the most complex, you can support any size or type of gathering. In fact, just in the last year, over 6 billion minutes of content have been consumed using Webex webinars and events.
So, let's talk about webinars. With Webex, your next webinar can support up to 100,000 participants, the most in the industry. And over the last year, we have added even more features like breakout sessions and critical integrations into marketing technology solutions like Salesforce and Eloqua. Today, I'm thrilled to share what's coming next.
Later this year, you can take advantage of even more powerful branding and customization options. With the new stage manager, anyone on your team can have access to a library of colorful backdrops as well as the ability to use logos, images, titles, and so much more to uplevel the look and feel of your webinar. And this is all included as part of the Webex Suite with no additional complexity or cost.
Another exciting capability we are introducing is our new NDI integration. With this advanced option, your production teams can add custom animations, overlays, music, and so much more to elevate the production quality of your next broadcast.
Moving on to Webex Events, our end-to-end event management platform. Over the last year, Webex Events enabled over two and a half million attendee-to-attendee connections. That just blows my mind. We also built feature velocity with many new releases, including Simuli for virtual events as well as contactless check-in and batch printing for in-person events. Webex Events provides the tools to make every experience count. Let's take a look.
What if your next event could be more engaging, more customized for large multi-day conferences? What if it could be more profitable for your business? [music] More personalized for a better user experience, with more ways for attendees to plan and participate. More ways for them to connect with each other [music] and more ways for you to leave a lasting impression. [music] Whether your next event is in-person, virtual, or both, Webex gives you more ways to build and manage it simply and seamlessly.
Today, I'm excited to announce even more innovations to our world-class end-to-end event management platform, like our new real-time captions and translations. Whether your streams are live, simulive, or on demand, translate to over 30 languages on any device at no additional cost with Webex Events. In fact, Webex One, the event you're watching right now, is using this feature as I speak. So, try it. Change your captions to German, Spanish, Mandarin — it's completely up to you.
Now I want to shift to the event planner experience. Planning events is hard and keeping event information up to date can be painful. We have heard horror stories where planners desperately dial IT admins at all hours to make a quick but critical change to their event website, and then they must find and do it again and again and again in five other locations. It can be a real headache. Our new embedded content widgets give planners control and the peace of mind they need.
Simply embed your speaker, sponsor, and agenda modules when building your event website, and that's it. Last-minute agenda change? No problem. Spelling error? We've got you covered. Make the update in Webex Events, and wherever that module exists, the information is updated instantly. You now have a single source of truth for all your events.
We're also making the registration process smarter. Webex Events now uses conditional logic so you can personalize the event experience for your attendees by collecting relevant information during the registration process. For instance, if you select that you're an IT administrator, you'll automatically get asked about IT focus areas and attending the IT networking dinner rather than the marketing or sales breakouts. And like the rest of Webex Events, it's easy. Just drag and drop. No coding required.
More than ever before, in-person and virtual attendees are coming together, each enjoying unique but equal experiences. No matter how they choose to attend, they should feel connected at every stage of your event. Our brand-new customizable virtual lobby is the perfect venue to welcome attendees, build excitement, and kickstart networking.
Lastly, we are returning to in-person events with many unknowns. Who's going to come? Are the VIPs here yet? What check-in stations are slammed? With our new on-site metrics dashboard, you get detailed attendee check-in data to make changes in real time. Reallocate staff to the station with most check-ins. Notify the executive team that the VIPs have arrived and know that one of the batch printers is down. Not only will this help you optimize this event, it also helps you plan for the next one.
These features are part of a comprehensive solution that enables you to run your entire events and webinars program. And if you haven't heard it enough yet, all of this is included in the Webex Suite. Webinars and events are great, but they're even better with Slido, our powerful audience engagement platform. And here is Nikki to share more on that.
Thanks, Jarkin. Slido is helping build a culture of trust and transparency across organizations [music] and making events more engaging with live polls, Q&A, quizzes, and word clouds. We're proud to say Slido has supported 260 million participants and counting. Slido polls foster inclusivity by allowing everyone to actively participate to share opinions and concerns. Moderated questions and answers empower employees to ask questions anonymously so leaders can address the tough questions on the minds of their employees.
When successfully deployed, Slido can break down the barriers between office and remote workers to foster a community of shared values and high levels of trust. And we've continued to add rich features to that experience over the last year. Today, we're introducing the ability to identify top and trending topics in Slido polls and Q&A in real time. This allows hosts to spot common themes and filter participant responses to keep the conversation flowing around topics that everyone is passionate about. You are going to want this for your next team meeting.
Presentations are a way of life. Knowing how your presentation is landing is easier to gauge in a room full of people. However, when everyone is not in the same room, polling is a great way to understand whether your audience is engaged. But between the delivery and the response, there can be a stressful lag. Our new typing indicator helps break through the silence. The typing indicator not only notifies you that people are engaged, it also shows you that many are actively responding and participating.
Our expanded rating system with Slido deserves a smiley face. Stars work when you want to understand how great a presentation or video is. But Slido polls now offer emojis so you can actually measure emotion and sentiment. That's better than real life. Even more, as a part of the Webex Suite, Slido is integrated automatically across meetings, webinars, and more.
And just like polling, asynchronous video is changing the way we communicate. Teams are increasingly distributed across geographies and time zones, and people are getting burned out with far too many meetings. Sometimes it's not practical or even necessary to have a meeting. And that's why we introduced VidCast as a part of the Webex Suite. Our goal was to give people time back in their day and free them from endless meetings. A little over a year in, and it's clear that asynchronous video has become a critical tool in our hybrid world.
I'm proud to say that VidCast has saved 47 million meeting minutes to date and counting. Customers are already using VidCast for everything from leader check-ins, HR and product updates to internal trainings and more. VidCast is an easy-to-use personal way to record, edit, and share videos that can be consumed anytime. It's designed to save the viewer time with accelerated playback, chapters, and transcript navigation, so viewers can skip straight to what's important.
The built-in collaboration features allow viewers to provide feedback and comments so teams can iterate and align quickly across schedules. Since introducing VidCast, we've added over 40 new features based on customer feedback to make the experience even more powerful. Now, when you log into VidCast, you'll see a redesigned homepage with videos specifically recommended for you. Our AI recommendation engine will surface videos trending across your organization and new videos created by creators whose videos you watch.
You also have new built-in insights such as views over time and viewer retention, so you can understand how you might optimize future videos for a better viewership experience. Now, for something I'm super excited about. We are just about to release new AI-powered editing capabilities to drastically reduce the time it takes to create polished content. With AI editing, you'll be able to create a polished video that you'll feel good about sharing with execs or customers in just one take.
Finally, Slido is integrated across much of the Webex Suite, including VidCast. Our Slido integration will make your VidCast even more interactive with the ability to embed a poll. Ask viewers to rate your content or collect feedback on a topic with a multiple-choice or free-form poll template. VidCast can truly change the way you work. I invite you to try it now on vidcast.io. It's free to sign up and easy to get started. I can't wait to see what you'll create. Now back to you, Javeed.
Thank you so much, Nikki. What you've just seen is the breadth of the Webex Suite. But unlike other vendors, you also saw real examples of how our capabilities work together as an integrated solution, like escalating a message to a call and then to a meeting, or whiteboarding and polling that you can use in a meeting, outside a meeting, or even in a VidCast. Or the amazing audio improvements with AI that are available in a meeting, on phone calls, and on all of our devices.
With disparate solutions from multiple vendors, these experiences are disjointed. With a single suite from Webex, you get a consistent, unified experience. That's the power of a single collaboration platform. Plus, it saves you money because you don't have to buy these capabilities individually from multiple vendors. Now let's talk about how we are making it easy to secure and manage these workloads.
Of course, security is paramount because with hybrid work, people are working from everywhere. They're using managed and unmanaged devices, and they are accessing applications across multiple clouds. With hybrid work, the attack surface and risks are constantly expanding. Manageability is a big concern for IT because today's hybrid collaboration environment is complex. That is what we are solving at Webex: delivering secure collaboration solutions that are easy to manage and administer.
Let me tell you about some of these latest innovations. At the center of all our collaboration offerings is the Control Hub. Control Hub is the one centralized administration tool for all Webex services, including devices, and now also allows you to manage your contact center. Not only can you provision, administer, and manage your Webex deployment, IT administrators get rich insights into usage, adoption, and performance. All of this in a single pane of glass so you can stay compliant and in control.
But there's more. The new Control Hub is a coach guiding you through the complexities of this new hybrid work world. Built-in AI suggests ways to improve manageability and help guide administrators with actionable insights. You can improve adoption, execute your compliance strategy, and set goals to help you take advantage of the entire Webex ecosystem. All this while having complete control of where your data lives.
And I'm really excited about our new audio watermarking technology coming soon. The Webex audio intelligence team that built our amazing noise removal capabilities have now taken security to the next level. Now, before the pandemic, confidential meetings were held with everyone in person, maybe in a secure boardroom or a conference room. Now with hybrid work and dispersed remote teams, it's more difficult to keep meetings confidential. Audio watermarking gives you the added peace of mind.
So let's say I'm doing a confidential briefing. You never know who might be secretly recording the call, and if they are, how would you track it to the source? When you mark a meeting as privileged, each audio stream for every participant is watermarked with a unique identifier, and this audio watermark cannot be heard by the human ear. So if the recording leaks, your security team can easily track it back to the original source.
In addition to what we do to help you stay secure, we make it easy for you to take advantage of your other existing security investments. That's why we've integrated with some of the leading security, compliance, and DLP vendors. With everything you've heard, you can see how serious we are about security and manageability. Security is paramount for us, for you, and for our products.
We pride ourselves in building delightful products that are easy to use and offer the most robust security in the industry by far, and we make it easy for you to manage your deployments with a single pane of glass to give you rich and useful insights. But don't just take my word for it. Our customers have some great stories too. So joining us next is Aruna Ravi Chandran, our senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Webex. She's going to sit down with CIOs to talk to us about how they view hybrid work security and what's next for their work experiences. Over to you, Aruna.
Thank you, Javeed. When we all shifted to remote work, it was expected to be a short-term reaction to the global pandemic. Almost 3 years later, it's now become the norm and a driving force in employee retention. Yet most organizations have designed their systems and processes for an in-office workforce. To discuss how we move forward with hybrid work and what that means for businesses and employees alike, I'm thrilled to welcome two of our very esteemed customers to Webex One: Raji Kana, CIO of Aon, and Kate Prrowy, CIO of Akamai. Welcome.
Hi Aruna. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Hey everyone, good to be here. Thanks for having us.
Welcome guys. So, let's get started. So, tell me a little bit about your role, your company. Give us a little bit of additional color about your company. So, let's start with you, Kate.
Hi. Yes, I'm Kate Prrowy. I am the CIO of Akamai Technologies. So, Akamai powers and protects life online. We have the largest distributed compute platform in the world with approximately 350,000 servers in over 130 countries. So we basically enable online security, compute, and content delivery for any customer that does business online.
We have about 10,000 employees globally and are headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Awesome. Thank you. How about you, Raji?
