Enterprise Connect 2016 Keynote Cisco Rowan Trollope

Rowan Trollope, Cisco's SVP of Collaboration, unveiled Spark, a cloud-native platform combining messaging, calling, and meetings in one service. Spark runs entirely in the cloud with no on-premise gear, uses a single backend, and lets developers build integrations via APIs. Cisco backed it with a $150 million development fund and room devices like the SX10 that auto-join meetings.
Chapters
Welcome to the stage, Eric Craft.
Hi, welcome back. Hope you enjoyed the panel. I thought it was great, terrific discussion between our end users. And now we're going to start our keynotes. And our first keynoter is getting to be kind of a familiar face to the Enterprise Connect audience. Rowan Trollope started as the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Collaboration Unit at Cisco back in 2012. And if you kind of look at what's happened since then, Cisco and of course the industry as a whole going from kind of that earlier generation of voice over IP and what you might call first generation UC into the kind of vision that if you're here yesterday, you heard Rowan Trollope describe in the UC Summit where you have a cloud-enabled collaboration platform that's really much more about transforming your business. And so we're very excited to hear Rowan describe a little bit more of how Cisco sees that going forward. And so I'm going to just turn the stage over to Rowan at this point. Please join me in welcoming Senior Vice President and General Manager for the Collaboration Business Unit at Cisco, Rowan Trollope.
Thank you. Thanks, Eric. Wow. Good crowd. It's great to be back. It's great to be back. Can we get the house lights up a little bit, please? Turn those up. So we've been having a lot of fun at Cisco. Can you tell? Yes? Can you tell? We are having fun. You know, we've been on a journey for 3 years, and if you've heard me talk before, you will recognize that I'm really passionate about the user experience. And that's pretty much what I talk about all the time, pretty much like a crazy person, I think, sometimes. And on that journey, you know, we've made a lot of changes over the last few years, and I wanted to actually start today by just telling you a quick story about what inspires us and what inspires me, a journey actually that I got to take many years ago and a very fantastic experience. Now to get started, I want to ask Are there any astronauts in the room? Show of hands. No astronauts? Darn. Okay, good. Well, is there anyone that has ever experienced weightlessness? Real weight— not underwater. Okay. A handful of people. So you might have done what I did a few years ago, and it's called the zero-g experience. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but they take like a 747 or some sort of a plane and they carve it out. There's nothing inside of it. You've heard of this? And so I had a chance to go do this thing. And what happens is it's a big empty plane, and it looks like a spaceship inside. It's all white. And they take you up really, really high, and then they do these parabolic curves up and down. And each time you go down, you experience weightlessness. And this is how they train astronauts, and this is how they shoot movies where they have weightlessness, like "The Martian," etc. They do that in one of these chambers, in one of these planes. So many years ago, I had a chance to go do this, and I can very remember— I remember really, really well sitting in— this— it looked like a Top Gun thing in the middle of Nevada desert, like little chairs, and we're like in these blue flight suits that they put us in. And there's a lady at the front and she's sort of teaching us. She's like, okay, now here's what's going to happen. They're giving us the whole pre-flight briefing. And I remember she says, now you're going to be up in the air and we're going to have you all lie down and we're going to give you a countdown: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. And as soon as we get to zero, you are going to float off of the ground, and for the first time in your life, you will experience what it's really like to be weightless. And then you will laugh. "Huh!" That's what I said. I started laughing. I was like, "What?" Of course, here I am, an engineer, I'm like, "Question: Does everyone laugh?" She says, "Yes." And I said, "Hmm. Is this some sort of a physiological reaction, or what's going on here? Why do people laugh?" And she just looks at me and she's like, "You'll see." So I'm like, "All right, fine." So fast forward, I'm in the plane, we're lying down, they're doing the countdown, we're all sort of pumped up. And of course, I'm thinking about this. I'm like, "I'm not going to laugh. Like, I'm going to float, I'm going to be just checking it out, it's going to be awesome." And of course, what happens? They do the thing, and 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I rise up off the ground, and I start floating, and I burst in, like, just burst out laughing. And so did everybody else. Now, I told that story a few months ago, and someone related back to me that they were talking to a real astronaut, which is why I asked if there was a real astronaut in the room. And they said the same thing, that everybody has that reaction. All the astronauts have the same reaction when they get to— if you haven't done it, I really encourage you to try it. It's a little on the expensive side, so if you can do some sort of boondoggle with your company, that's the best way to go, frankly. So, I tell you that story because that's the kind of an experience that inspires me, right? It's something that was enabled by technology. I could have never had that experience if it wasn't for all this crazy technology that we have today. And that's the kind of experience that, you know, I'd like to create in our products. Now, that doesn't mean that I want you to laugh the first time you see Cisco Spark, okay? That's not the reaction we're going for. But it does mean that we want to create these sort of magical moments for our users, and that's what we've been focused on doing for 3 years. And like I said, we're having a really good time and we're making good progress. But 3 years ago, we recognized that there was one big inhibitor to us achieving that goal, and that's this. And I'm going to put it on the thing here. I'm going to go back on stage. You can put it up there. That's this. So what is this? This is my poor attempt at a slide to show complexity. That's complexity. And that's the world that we live in. And in the collaboration industry, how I feel is that that's what we've been struggling with. We've been trying to, you know, achieve something that our users really want, which is an amazing experience from us. And the complexity of the industry as we know it today has really gotten in the way of that. So we believed that to achieve these dreams that we had, we needed to have a completely fresh start. We had to start again. And we had to reimagine all of that into something completely simple and totally new. And of course, We chose the cloud to do that. So 4 months ago, we announced Cisco Spark. And, and you might know Cisco Spark. You might say, hold on a second, Rowan, I downloaded Spark. How many of you have downloaded Spark? Can I see a show of hands? Most of you. Great. The rest of you can do it now. It's totally fine. Just kidding. Don't do it now, do it after. You might be saying to yourself, well, wait a sec, Cisco Spark, I think I downloaded that. That's like It looks like a messaging app, and you'd be right. It's kind of like WhatsApp on steroids, built for business. That's what Spark looks like today, uh, and we shipped that in December, but we had much bigger aspirations, um, because Spark is really way more than the application that you've seen. In fact, Spark underneath the covers is really a revolutionary cloud platform that combines all of the complexity that you saw earlier, everything in that— in this collaboration space, into one single cloud platform. And it's all done for one very specific reason. We're not building things in the cloud just because it's a cool new technology. I mean, look, I'm an engineer. We like to do that. We like to take advantage of new technologies. But this is not technology for technology's sake. And it's not because of cost either, although that might be a fine reason to leverage the cloud. There's a really, really important reason, and that's what's written above here: a breakthrough experience. That's what we want to be able to create. It doesn't mean every experience has to be a breakthrough. It means we want to focus on finding those moments for our users that can really inspire them, those magical moments. And that's what we've set out to build with Cisco Spark, a revolutionary cloud platform. And on top of that, we will build some breakthrough experiences, and so will you. And that's the goal with Spark. So let me tell you what it looks like. These are the 3 capabilities that we sort of narrowed down to. We took everything that we had in the Cisco portfolio— where's my water? There it is. We took everything that we had in the Cisco portfolio and we collapsed it all down to these 3 categories, and we deliver all 3 of these capabilities through the cloud. 100% with no premise requirements at all. So let me tell you, I'm going to give you a quick flyby on 3 things you need to know about Spark, because we're going to go through each of these in a little bit of detail, and of course you can find out more after this. The first thing I want to tell you about Spark is that it simplifies everything. So we focused on simplification of that complexity. So we took a fresh look, uh, starting with messaging. Now messaging, of course, we all know going back to the ICQ days, right? And instant messaging was— has sort of been an outgrowth of ICQ. In fact, if you look at today's most modern instant messaging products, they look pretty much like AOL or ICQ things that you had 10 years ago. The buddy list, the contact list, etc. Those things really haven't changed in a long time. This is not that. This is a total ground-up rethink of what messaging is. And we identified this trend over 3 years ago as we saw what was happening in the consumer space with apps like WhatsApp and apps like Line and Viber and WeChat and you name it. And we said, wow, there's billions of people. In fact, the killer app on, on mobile— I mean, mobile is the most important technology that's probably hit this world since the internet, and the killer app on mobile is messaging. So everybody gets this metaphor, and it's different than IM. It's really different. So Spark Messaging was a total ground-up rethink. It's not instant messaging, it's way more than that. Sort of, we've done for the IM world what Tesla did for cars. We totally rethought the whole thing, and it's a very different experience. It might look the same, it might appear to be the same on the surface, but it's very different. Now we're seeing that not just with our technology, but the industry is seeing that, right? We're seeing millions of users migrate onto these messaging, business messaging platforms. Eric mentioned a few of them at the beginning, if you were here. He talked about all the, all the new entrants into this space. We mentioned some of them yesterday as well. There's a tremendous amount of energy around this new category of messaging. So we felt, we felt that would need to be the core and the starting place for Spark. And people who are using Spark love it. They're seeing their email volumes go down. They're seeing that they need to have less meetings with their team. It's just an incredible app, and we built it for mobile first, so it's a really dynamic and great experience. You've got to try it. We also built this using the latest— of course, we started from scratch. We built it using the most modern practices, which means we have a continuous delivery pipeline. What does that mean? Well, that's a new engineering technique for delivering new features all the time. So just since we shipped in— well, I guess announced in December, or even before then, I guess, would actually be middle of last year since we launched the app, we've shipped 40 new features into the application. Now, if you've been in IT, you know, if you've been in IT software, you know that that doesn't happen in enterprise. You upgrade once a year, if that, and your users get upset that they don't get the latest features, and it's hard, and there's all these problems. Well, there's a new way. That's continuous integration and continuous delivery, using the most modern principles of of cloud computing. We've done that in Spark, which means we're delivering new features and capabilities all the time. So if you saw it 6 months ago, you need to take a new look because we're dynamically upgrading it all the time. Okay, so that's Spark, the— that's Spark, the messaging component of Spark. So now let's talk about something new: calling. We talked about all the complexity that you saw previously, and of course we're at Enterprise Connect. I think you guys all know way more about telephony than I do. But I can tell you that Spark is a first— it's a full business-class telephony solution delivered 100% from the cloud. And we built this for companies of all sizes. Large, small, doesn't matter. We, we didn't put limits on this technology in terms of how far it can scale. Obviously, it's multi-tenant, so we can have a lot of users on there. Now, initially, we're going to target more towards the small end of the market. But fundamentally, this cloud calling solution can scale to businesses large and small. In addition to building a full business-class telephony solution in the cloud, we are upgrading all of our phone models— 6 of our phone models— and we built a brand new operating system called the Spark OS. And the Spark OS runs on our phones and connects directly to the cloud, and it doesn't connect over the traditional protocols like you might imagine, like SIP or XMPP. It connects using RESTful web APIs, which is the new way of connecting and communicating on the internet. And that's going to be really important when we get to talk about the next subject. So we've used the exact same— we've used the Spark platform and the APIs to build this entire Spark OS. Now what does that do on our phones? Well, number one, you get to plug phones in, all of our great phones. We have award-winning phones. They're super super cool, we love them. Uh, you can plug them in and it's instant setup. You plug it into any internet connection, you don't need to have a VPN, you don't need to have any— anything like that. We handle all the security end-to-end. And out of the box, in less than a few minutes, you're connected and you've got your telephony system running. You can plug all those in. And finally, it's completely managed through the cloud, so there's no— there's nothing for you to do. You just run it and execute. You just log into our— into your— into our web browser, into our management console, and manage those phones and devices from our cloud. Now, because Spark OS is— or so think about it like iOS— we keep that, that operating system up to date. The firmware we can keep up to date, which means we can ship new features, which means we can keep it fresh and do everything else. We guarantee that that's going to work with our cloud all the time. Okay, so that's Spark Calling. 6 of our phone models, the phone OS, the Spark OS that we're shipping on, on the phones, uh, and the service that we will provide in the cloud for calling. Okay? That's the second one. Third is meetings. Now here, what we did is we addressed something that I think really needed to be addressed in this industry. And that's the fact that there are two industries that really should be one. Web conferencing and video conferencing. There's no reason that these should be two separate categories because at the end of the day, people just have meetings. So we decided we're not gonna have two categories, we're just gonna have one category and it's gonna be called meetings. So think about this like we— WebEx and telepresence had a baby, and it's a beautiful baby, okay? We took the best of both. It's not like when those two celebrities get together and their baby is weirdly ugly and you're like, what happened? Uh, no, this is a beautiful child and you're gonna love it. And we've completely redesigned the meeting experience to go along with that, okay? Now we acquired recently— I think you all know we acquired Akano. We brought in some incredible media experts who are helping us in the backend bring some of that expertise into this platform as well. So we can deliver the best media, we can deliver the best experience. Now, we went one step further there as well. Of course, Cisco is known for our award-winning endpoints, our room systems, right? So we took that Spark OS and we made a version of that for our room-based systems. So as of today, The SX10, which we actually have here on stage, the little guy, uh, this SX10 is running Spark OS and is connected directly to the Spark Cloud, and we're gonna give you a demonstration of that. Um, but we'll be taking that Spark operating system and rolling it out across the rest of our endpoints through the balance of this year. So you'll see all the rest of our SX and MX lineup getting updated to connect directly to our cloud. And What you're gonna see when you— in fact, I'll show it to you in a minute. We really have been able to achieve some of those breakthroughs, those breakthrough experiences, those magical moments that we talked about earlier in redesigning this experience. So we'll get to that, and I'll actually demonstrate, and you can be the judge if it's a magical moment. Okay, so that's Spark Meetings. So the Spark service, messaging, calling, meetings, collapsing all of that complexity that we talked about at the beginning into a really fresh start for Cisco and for our customers and for our partners. A revolutionary cloud platform, and I'm gonna show you these breakthrough experiences that we've built. But I think even more important, frankly, than the experiences that we have been able to create are— is gonna be the experiences that you all can create on Spark. And that's the next thing I want to tell you about Spark, is it's open. I said I was gonna say 3 things. The first thing is it's simple. The second thing is it's open. Of course, if we're gonna call it a platform, it has to be open, right? Any platform has gotta be able to be built on by other people. And this is what we're really, really, really excited about. There's all the awesome stuff we can do, but there's even more awesome things that all of you can do, and the development community, and so on. So it was for that reason that in December we announced Spark for Developers. And that's really designed from the ground up with developers in mind. In fact, our CTO, Jonathan, enforced a rule upon our own development team as they built Spark Operating System and the Spark app and all the different experiences you're going to see from us. And that rule was this: our developers had to use the very same APIs that we would publish to all of you for free. So we're using the very same APIs that you get access to. So we're really excited about that, that we can publish these APIs to you and you can start to build applications on top of the Spark development platform. So it's really the first of its kind in many ways, and we've leapfrogged the competition here, really. There's 3 ways you can integrate onto or build on the Spark platform. Number 1, with integrations, very simple webhooks. You can go take a look at this for yourself, or I'll share the URL in a sec. The second is bots. You can build bots. You probably all Heard about bots, that's all the rage right now. And third, you can build applications and use our web APIs to actually build your own applications, your own interfaces. So you can integrate it into existing workflows or other tools. We've seen partners like Zendesk do that. You can build bots. I'm gonna demonstrate a bot for you shortly. Of course, you've probably all seen bots before. And then you can build full applications, full-blown applications on top of the Spark Development Platform. So how do you do it? It's really easy. I mentioned it earlier. REST APIs. That's the industry standard. It makes it super simple to build on top of this platform. Um, and we have a great interactive development portal to get you started. So you can go to our URL. In fact, I'll give it to you in a sec, and you can sign up today. If you have a Spark account, you can sign up. You get a— you get automatically get access to the development portal, and you can instantly create an application or an integration in minutes. Very exciting. And this portal is really terrific. I'll have to thank the Tropo team for helping us do that. And of course we have 24/7 developer support. So if you get into trouble and you're building this and you're selling— you're building applications or you're a customer, you're gonna get the full force of support from Cisco that you would expect from something like this. So that's also, I think, an industry first. So 24/7 support, easy to integrate, modern APIs. Very exciting. The Tropo team helped us do this. They had an incredible team— they have an incredible team who built an amazing community of developers on a different set of APIs around PSTN voice applications and SMS. Those are also part of the Spark platform. So we've rolled those up into the platform as well. So you not only get all the new stuff from Spark, you also get the stuff from Tropo. So there's just a tremendous amount of things you can do with this platform. And of course, we're just getting started. So that's very exciting. Now, when we launched, we announced with 10 partners, companies like Zendesk and others, Trello, some of the modern GitHub examples you would expect. But just in the last month, we made really good progress. In the last month, we had 10,000 Spark developers sign up. We had 10,000 signups onto the platform. So people are really jumping on board, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of activity in all kinds of new interesting ideas, stuff that's surprising us, that we're just like, "Wow, this is amazing," what the ideas that people have. So to show that we're really serious about this platform, we're gonna put our money where our mouth is. So today I'm very pleased to announce $150 million development fund from Cisco that we are going to use to help the community, both developers, startups, investments in startups, equity and non-equity, you know, all kinds of other forms of incentives to you, the community, to build applications, integrations, and bots on this platform. So we're really serious about this. We want to help you do it. We want to fund you to do it. We want to help you get started, and we're putting our money where our mouth is. So our team is going to manage that, and you can get more details here. You can get on board by going to developer.ciscospark.com/fund. So if you're interested in building integrations, if you're interested in building and working with Cisco on Spark, Please go to this website and take a look at it, okay? All right, so that's a big announcement. We're excited about that. Yes, thank you. One person who whistled. Now, the third thing I want to tell you about Spark is it is enterprise class. So it's simple, it's a platform, it's open, and it's enterprise class. So this is built for business. Right? This is built for our customers. We sell to businesses. People keep asking me about consumer and whether we're gonna go there. The answer is no. We're focused on tools for people who work. Consumers have plenty of great stuff. Us people that work need awesome stuff too. So the first thing is security. Now look, I could go on and on and on about security, um, and I don't have time unfortunately, but if you want to catch me out in the hall, I will go on and on and on about security because we have built a tremendous amount of security. We paid more attention to security security of this platform. And I think that's very relevant given the news that is out in the world today, and particularly about cloud. So we have a whole bunch of really innovative approaches to securing this platform. I think it's one of, if not the most secure messaging platforms in the world. Complete end-to-end encryption. The way we handle keys is very amazing in terms of the way we can— where we can put them and how customers can access them. It's really, really secure, uh, and we've done a really tremendous job there. Even searching, for example, is secure in Spark. It's a hard problem to solve when you talk about moving technology to the cloud and having it be encrypted. In fact, this is the reason our competitors would give you why they cannot encrypt your data at rest, because they need to have search. Well, we figured out a way to do it. We can search your data even when it's encrypted on our servers. So you get a really, really secure service. Next, it's reliable. Of course, When you think about the cloud and over-the-top and all that kind of stuff, you start to think, well, gosh, this thing is gonna— you know, what about— your user's not gonna care when they pick up their phone if it doesn't work. You know, oh, well, that's in the cloud, it's over-the-top, so we might have lost a few packets. No. This solution has to be totally reliable. So we've developed a whole new architecture for making sure that we can deliver a real-time SaaS service with great reliability. And part of that actually involves our partners and our partners' networks. So this is partially a networking solution and, and leveraging the cloud, as well as some technology for using microservices and putting them at different places in the infrastructure to guarantee and make sure we can deliver reliable quality service. So a lot of detail there. We announced that and we called that Spark Hybrid Services, actually. So this whole capability around reliability came together in something called Spark Hybrid Services, which I'll touch on in a minute. The last thing is, of course, it has to be manageable. So it has to be reliable. You also have to be able to manage it. You can take a look at our management console. We've taken that same, you know, vibe about simplicity right into the management console. So you'll see a great experience in our management console, the technology that you'll use to manage this for your users. We're pretty excited about that. Now, if we did all three of those things, Would that be enough? You know, would it be enough if we simplified everything and made it an open platform, and gosh, Rowan, and if we made it secure and reliable and manageable, is that enough? The answer is no, that's not enough. And that's why we introduced this idea of Spark Hybrid Services I just mentioned. And the Spark Hybrid Services, what that allows us to do is one thing. It allows us to connect everything that you already have in your infrastructure and make it better. So whether that's HCS, whether that's Call Manager, right, whether that's BE6K, with any of the technologies that we've sold into our customer base, even all of the hardware endpoints that we've sold recently, all the infrastructure that we have sold to our customers that you are using, we can connect to all of that through Spark Hybrid Services. So that's the one final piece I think is really, really important. We make all of that better. So at this point, With all of these facts under your belt, you might be asking yourself, or you want to ask me, how do I buy this thing? Where do I get it? Well, let me tell you. Are you asking that question? Of course you are. Yes, you are. So continuing my theme of simplicity, it's really easy to buy. 3 simple steps. It's consumption-based. It's usage-based. So however many users you want to have on the system, you tell us that. Which services do you want? Messaging, meetings, and calling. You can pick from a list of services. And then you can add from the 6 phone models or all of our SX and MX line when they come out this year. Okay, so you can buy those technologies, 1, 2, 3, a simple monthly or annual subscription price per user based on the services that you choose. And we deliver that, again, operated by Cisco, but delivered exclusively through our partners. So our partners are a big part of delivering this service to all of you. Do you need to get that? Go ahead. Who is it? You're not gonna get it. Okay. Respond with a text that says, "I'm in a keynote." No. Or use Spark. Exactly. So we made it really easy to buy. Now I'm totally off track. Where was I? We made it really easy to buy, and you should buy it. So please go to our— please go to the website and take a look at it. That's the second announcement of the day, is that Spark is available now. In the United States, as of today, you can order and purchase Cisco Spark online through our partners. Go take a look and get the details. Over the next few days, you will actually see releases from some of our largest partners, service providers, reseller partners, and as they are ready, they've been working with us in advance to get ready to deliver this technology to you. So, so please go take a look. So now we've done a lot of talking, and of course I love to get my hands dirty on technology, so how about we stop with the talk and give you some demos. Would you like that? One— would you like a taste? Okay. Good. I'm glad you said that, 'cause I was gonna do the demo anyways. So we'll start out here, and I'm gonna just focus on kind of— I'm gonna do two things. I'm gonna show one thing we've built, and I'm gonna show one thing that somebody else built on the platform. And the thing that we built— and we don't have much time, so I'm just gonna blaze through this, but I want to show you how we've created a breakthrough experience, one breakthrough experience. You can see more in the booth downstairs, you can go to the website, you can take a look, but I wanna show you one breakthrough experience. And so for this breakthrough experience, we wanted to solve what I view as one of, if not the most annoying pain points around collaboration in business, and that is joining a meeting. Have you ever been late to join a meeting because the technology didn't work? Can I see a show of hands? If you don't raise your hand, you're lying. That's okay. Or you're shy. Everybody's had this problem. I hate it. And there's just a lot of different— again, the picture of complexity that I showed earlier is part of the culprit that causes this problem. We wanted to make that a magical breakthrough experience for your users. So let me show you how we've done that. So I'm going to open Spark on my phone here. And of course we start on the phone. And I'm gonna, first I'm gonna just pair so we get the screen. You guys tell me when you can see the screen up there. Can you see it? Is it live? There it is. Okay. So of course I'm gonna open Spark. We have one integrated experience for all of the things we just talked about. You can see, of course this, if you've downloaded it, you see this is my room list. Shared rooms, one-on-one rooms. There's even a meeting going on right now Looks like Jens has shared a file. There's, there's having a leadership team meeting. I could join that meeting. That's a room that I'm already in. I could just dynamically join that meeting if I wanted to. I'm not going to do that. We don't want to interrupt his meeting with all of you. Uh, we also have teams, a team capability where you can create teams, organize your rooms around teams and so on. You have to take a look at that. Kind of doing a flyby. It's kind of quick. Uh, calling, what you would expect. Someone asked about this. On Twitter. Kevin, I think his name was. Of course, you can make calls from Spark. If you have the Spark calling service, you can make calls. There it is right there, even to the PSTN, no problem. So I told you I want to focus on meetings, so let's focus right on that. So I've sort of swiped across the bottom, across all 4 of those tabs. Now I'm on the Meetings tab, and what you see here— I'm going to show you a scheduled meeting experience. So we've scheduled a meeting to occur from 9:30 to 11:30, which is this weekly check-in. And you can see there's a join button there. So if you're like me, you probably just want to push the join button and you'll join the meeting. Of course, that's true. But what I really want to do is I want to join the meeting in this awesome conference room that we've set up behind us. So we shipped two of these SX10s out here. You can see one on the right and one on the left. Now there's no man behind the curtain, there's no BE6K or some other infrastructure that these are plugged into. They're just on the internet. We just ask them for an internet cable, we We got it, an Ethernet connection. These are just on the internet. We authenticated and set them up in minutes and added them to this account. OK? So all I have to do to join my meeting is first walk up to my meeting room. And what will happen, you'll see, when I walk up to the meeting room, is it should automatically recognize that I've entered the room or gotten close to the system. OK? And when I do that, you're going to see my face appear on screen. So the first thing you have to do is pray to the demo gods. This is a live— demo. We're using real code. There's no Flash or animations, which means we don't know if it's always going to work, but it should because we're shipping today. So my dev team, it better work. All right, so let's try it. All right, here we go. I'm walking over, and as I get over close to this guy— and if we were in a room, this would happen, you would see my face— there it is. It just appeared on screen. So thank you. Now we did not pair these in advance. This phone has never heard of that system. They've never talked before. Before. We've used some little secret sauce to build. Now, that's one magical moment. When your user walks into a conference room and it sees— and they see their face appear, it's like, wow, how did that happen? That's amazing. So now, what do you think I need to do to join my meeting now that I've walked into the room? What do you think? Anybody? Push the green button. Okay. So if I push this green button, what should happen is my call should actually automatically start right here, and I should join into my meeting. We're gonna join in with some of our developers, actually. There it is. We've joined, and there they are. All right, hey guys! Hey, Rowan! Hey, guys! Hey! Hey, Rowan! Hey! So first of all, look at the quality. I mean, the quality is the no-compromises and reliable experience you've come to expect from Cisco. This is not a private network or a dedicated network. This is over the top, right? So we're getting an incredible experience here, and all we had to do was touch one button. So I think this is our dev team in Boxborough. How are you guys? Looks like you're in a Scrum room. Is that right?
That's right.
That's right. Good. Well, we're going live today. And I know there's going to be a lot of usage. So we don't want to take up too much of your time. We want to make sure this thing keeps working. But I did want to show everyone the quality and the ease of connecting into this meeting. So could you say something back to me and say, that's awesome? That's amazing, Rowan. They're engineers. Give them a break. Just kidding. All right. Thanks a lot, guys. So now I want to show one other thing to the audience. So that's a breakthrough experience. When you put this in the hands of your users and it's affordable and you can do it easily because it's all in the cloud, right, they are going to say, "Wow, that's incredible." But I want to show you one more thing that we've done that I think is just fabulous. And that's Something that happens to me all the time, which is I often go into conference rooms when I didn't schedule the room. You've probably all been there when you're in the room, in your meeting, and you're having a great chat with your development team or whoever, and all of a sudden someone comes in and says, hey, I have this meeting booked, I have this room booked, you got to get out. So at that point, you know, it's kind of like mayhem ensues. You're, how do we, like, what are we going to do? I got to end the call. I got to go somewhere else. I got to jump in, right? It's a problem. Well, let me show you how we've made that experience better. So we're not supposed to be in this room. I'm supposed to be in that room. How do I do— how do I transition the meeting from one to the next? Well, all I have to do is swipe on my phone down. You can see that arrow at the top. So I'm going to swipe down. And what should happen when I do this is the meeting should literally move. The cloud should automatically detect this signal and it should say, well, the meeting is moving from there and now I need to send the media here and the meeting should move right to here. So let's go ahead and try that. I'm going to swipe down. You can see Release to move call to iPhone. It's bouncing. There it goes. And there we go. Now we're in this room on my phone. So I've taken the meeting with me, and I can stay in the meeting. Hey guys, you can still see me, I hope? Everything's working? Okay, good. Now what do I need to do is go find a new room. So that should be pretty easy. What do I do? Walk over to the new room. And as I walk over to the new room, What should happen? Lo and behold, if everything works, I disappear from that room and I appear on this room, like magic. I didn't have to do anything. And I can just take the call back, and now it knows that I'm in a new area, and I just swipe it up, and I drop it into the new room that I'm in, and it should transfer automatically here. Here we go. There they are. Hey guys, we're back. Hey, you're back? Yes. Yes. It worked. Well done. Have a beer at lunch on me. Guys, thanks a lot. The quality looked great. The experience was great. The folks here loved it. We really appreciate the time today. We'll let you get back to it. Thank you. Thank you. All right, take care. Bye now. All right. So that's one breakthrough experience we've created on this platform. And we're really excited about that. But I have to say— and oh, by the way, you can see on my iPhone. I'm gonna give that a 5 stars, of course. That was a 5-star experience. You can all attest to it. Um, there's one more thing I wanted to show you. You know, I talked earlier about the development platform. Of course, we're excited about the technologies we can build here, but we're more excited about the things that you can build on this platform. So I want to show you one such experience, uh, and, and that is actually dealing with a very common problem at Cisco. So one of the internal IT teams at Cisco decided to take a look at the Spark platform and build a really cool integration. What they did is, and you might have this at your company, we have a travel desk at Cisco, and the travel desk, I think it's hosted by, it's one of the travel desk companies, and when you, if you have a problem like your flight gets canceled, you call them, and you call the Cisco travel desk, and they book you a new flight. Everybody have one of those in your big company, like a travel desk of some sort? A few of you, okay. Cisco's may be a little different. So we have a travel desk, and that travel desk experience is basically a call center. So that team said, we want to have a new experience for dealing with things like when people miss their flights. We don't want to have them land up in an IVR. We'd like to use Spark. So that's what they did. So let me show you how that works. So I can come in here and I can add a bot that they've created called the Care Assistant. Okay, and the Care Assistant actually will handle multiple different times of types of requests. In this case, I'm going to pretend I'm going to have my flight was canceled. Need a new flight. And you'll see what's going to happen here. Create that. And there you go. The Care Assistant— so this is a bot. It's automatically looking at the text of my request. And it figures out that based on the fact that I've said flight or some other thing in that room, it's going to automatically, when it responds, connect me into a room with the appropriate agent. So if the care assistant is working— maybe the care assistant is down. This is an internal IT project, and this is why we always pray to the demo gods before we run a demo. But since that's not working, what I will show you is— I think we already have it kind of working here. Where is it? There we go. Oh, it worked. So it has created a room with Amy Robert. So It identified the appropriate agent who was waiting in the queue, and then it used the Spark APIs to create a room, in this case with Amy, and Amy now has my details, 'cause it's using, in this case, my Active Directory login from Spark. Single sign-on through my company's credentials. So it knows who I am, she knows the flight information that she's got for me. She says, you know, "Sorry to hear about it. Book me a new one." And I can just ask her to book me a new one right on text. And then hopefully she can do that. So she can now go off, book me a new flight, figure it out, uh, and then get me the details for that. So they've taken the API that we built, they've tied it into the contact center and the skills-based routing that we have, and automatically forwarded that to create a great new experience for our employees to make a painful experience like a canceled flight a little bit easier for folks. Okay. So that's an interesting innovation that was built on top of our platform. So we're really excited to hear about all the cool things that you can do on our platform as well. And again, we really want you to get started and build your technologies on that. Where's my clicker? There it is. All right. So, um, again, excited about the capabilities that we've built today. We really want you to get on board. I only get dressed up for special occasions. This is a special occasion for us. The launch and the availability of this technology and everything that we promised in the US today, rolling out through the rest of the world, through the rest of the year, and through all of our partners. I couldn't be sort of more excited than to share this moment with you. For us, it's a special moment for us. I'd like to thank you all for coming. I'd invite you down to our booth to come take a look or to download our app on the website. And frankly, we want to know what you think. You can hit us up on Spark or on Twitter or wherever. And so again, thanks for being here and sharing this moment with us, and we'll see you next year. Thank you. Thank you.
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