Cisco gives Skype for Business a seat at the conference table

San José, August 15, 2016: Cisco is on a mission to make collaboration simple, magical and open. We want to make connecting with others painless so you can get on with the task at hand and get great work done.

Today, we take a huge leap forward as we announce Cisco® Meeting Server. It makes it simple to connect people in Cisco video rooms with others who are using Skype for Business. In fact, with this technology, everyone can join—regardless of whether they are using Polycom or Avaya gear, a mobile client or a WebRTC-enabled browser. It’s as simple as clicking a link.

“Connecting should not be hard. But it has been, because certain vendors’ technologies have not played well with standards-based technologies, like Cisco’s industry-leading video systems. We just fixed that, and the impact is huge,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM of Cisco’s IoT and Applications Groups. “Just as you don’t think twice about whether an iPhone can call a Samsung Galaxy, enterprises need to know that everyone can join the meeting. And now they can.”

Customers agree. “Our users didn’t understand why they couldn’t connect Skype for Business and our Cisco video rooms. It didn’t make sense, and we needed to change that,” said Andrew Heintz, manager of video engineering at Exelon, a US-based energy provider. With Cisco Meeting Server, “now they don’t even think about it—a meeting is a meeting is a meeting. If they are in the office, they usually join from a Cisco video room. If they are working from home, they join that same meeting and get the same experience—but they join from Skype for Business.”

Additional benefits

A consistent, familiar meeting experience No matter what you are joining from, you’ll have a familiar look and feel. That’s important as most users will join from a video room one day, and a mobile client the next.

Better bandwidth use In the past, video conferences that connect multiple offices have sometimes led to high bandwidth bills. Cisco Meeting Server reduces these costs by optimizing bandwidth use between sites.

Lower costs We intentionally built Cisco Meeting Server to work best with lower-cost, standard Cisco UCS® hardware. This gives you flexibility to add servers as needed and keep initial costs low.

Virtually limitless meetings The product can support small organizations with only a few users to global enterprises with tens of thousands of users.

A simple user-based licensing model Companies can buy the services they need now and add as the organization grows.

A focus on security you expect from Cisco Cisco Meeting Server adheres to the most stringent security models.