Story by Jeffrey Schwartz, Channel Partners Online
As Microsoft migrates the online version of its Skype for Business and Teams into a single communications, messaging and conferencing platform, Cisco is waging a battle for customer and partner wallet with a “Teams” offering of its own.
Cisco’s new Webex Teams brings together Spark and WebEx solutions, which had many overlapping features. Jonathan Rosenberg, CTO of Cisco’s collaboration business, demonstrated WebEx Teams during this week’s Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida.
“Not only did we bring the brands together, we brought the technologies together,” Rosenberg said. During the demo, Rosenberg showcased the new Webex Teams capabilities such as the ability to render 25 meeting participants in a 5×5 grid; augmented reality with a demo that showed an image of an easel on the stage to viewers in a video conference; the ability to record meetings; and a new mobile client optimized for smartphones.