The Collaboration Singularity Is Drawing Closer – InfoWorld

Conceived on a napkin in 1993 by Richard Platt and David Tucker at Incite (soon to become Selsius Systems), the world's first IP PBX was a true killer app for the rapidly emerging IP network platform. Connecting people together via real-time voice turned out to be an ideal use of newly ubiquitous fast ethernet infrastructureand unifying voice and data networks helped turn convergence into a buzzword.

High-quality, real-time human-to-human communication requires a high-performance network, naturally, and in 1998 the soothsayers in Ciscos M&A division foresaw IP comms driving IP infrastructure spending, and a match made in Dallas was born. Currently representing well over $1 billion in direct sales of Cisco Unified Communications equipment, and many multiples of that in indirect network infrastructure revenue, its clear that connecting people over the network is a big deal. And while just about everyone else in Silicone Valley is focused in roughly the same head-space, Ciscos proven ability to weaponize its technology with industrial-strength security, reliability, manageability, and scaleand then point it at the lucrative enterprise marketturned it into the largest PBX vendor on the planet (from zero to #1 in under five years).

Figure 1 - Sexy! (and CSI's Ted Danson looks pretty good too...)

Convergence turned out to be more than a buzzword, and Cisco has innovated intensively ever since, integrating call center, voice mail, IM, conference calling, video, and immersive telepresence products into a complete arsenal for enterprise collaboration.

One key to the success of Cisco collaboration running on top of the network has been the success of a teeming ecosystem of solutions, integrations, applications, and scripts running on top of Cisco collaboration. In a word: developers. Rich APIs for call automation, management, compliance, interoperability, etc. mean ISVs and in-house devs can mainline business intelligence directly into the communications infrastructure: connecting people, systems, processes, and (most recently) the Internet of Things into one hyper-converged network of networks.

In its latest bid to assimilate the business world into The Network, Cisco Spark takes the IP collaboration stack out of the server closet and into the cloud, marrying persistent chat, WebEx-style video conferencing/screen-sharing, HD voice/video, and unique hardware endpoints into an elegant, multi-platform user experience that meanwhile keeps the tortured silicon (and sysadmins) to a minimum. In a play to further blur the lines between LAN and WAN (remember borderless networks?), Cisco Sparks unique end-to-end encryption, adaptive bandwidth usage, UC infrastructure interop, and sheer reliability-at-scale extend the tradition of killer comms forged in the sun of a million enterprise support contract SLAs.

Figure 2 - Cisco Spark: rich cloud collaboration on any device

Two recent innovations are particularly exciting both for users and developers: the launch of the Cisco Spark Board room-conferencing system, and the announcement of the Cisco Spark video SDK.

Garnering what amount to raves in the taciturn world of business equipment, the Cisco Spark Board is the Olympic gymnast of phones: it may well be on steroids, but it's elegant, immensely capable, and makes it all look dead easy.

Figure 3 - Compelling, powerful room collaboration: the Cisco Spark Board

The Spark Board connects effortlessly to the Cisco Spark cloud by simply plugging it into your network (your high-quality, Cisco specced network, natch.) It then provides the well-appointed enterprise conference room with a big, beautiful touchscreen video conferencing collaboration unit that connectsseemingly via ESPto your mobile or PC for screen-sharing, whiteboarding, etc. Combining sophisticated capabilities with intuitive use, backed by industry-leading security and availability, the Spark Board is pretty much the apotheosis of the original Selsius IP Phone.

Complementing Cisco Sparks ability to provide omnipresent video-enabled collaboration, the Cisco Spark video SDK gives developers the power to embed Spark-powered collaboration (including video, messaging, sharing, etc.) into their existing applications.

Figure 4 - Cisco Spark SDK video windows and controls embedded in an iPad app

Initially supporting iOS/Swift (with Android to follow) and browser-based apps via JavaScript and WebRTC, the Cisco Spark SDK provides frameworks and self-contained widgets that let coders turn a mobile app or a web page into a secure, high-performance collaboration tool with literally a few lines of code:

Figure 5 - Cisco Spark SDK video widget sample code

Combined with Ciscos existing Spark messaging APIsopening business IM up to the possibilities of chat bots connected to IT systems and automation of all kindsthis superset of pervasive cloud collaboration fully integrated into line-of-business apps, literally burning a hole in your pocket (in the case of a Note 7!) or immersing the boardroom (in the case of a Cisco Spark Board,) is nirvana for the agile enterprise.

Last-minute update: perhaps signaling the beginning of the collaboration singularity, Cisco has announced the acquisition of MindMeld, a San Francisco artificial intelligence luminary. Though details on how this will play out are scarcethe term cognitive collaboration is being bandied aboutits exciting to contemplate how networks, convergence, integration, and now artificial intelligence can potentially transform business communication yet again.

If you would like to learn about Spark APIs, a great place to start is our Spark page on Cisco DevNet.

David Staudt, Cisco DevNet Developer Evangelist / Principal Engineer, Cisco Systems Inc.@dstaudtatcisco

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The Collaboration Singularity Is Drawing Closer - InfoWorld