Getting Collaboration On at Cisco Live

This original article was written by Michelle Burbick the Associate Editor and blogger for No Jitter.  To read the complete article, please visit No Jitter 

To get my UC&C fix at last week’s Cisco Live customer and partner event, which primarily focused on networking and security, I headed to the “Collaboration Village” on the expo floor. There I caught up with the following four (new to me) companies. Read on for a snapshot of each company and how it differentiates itself…

Stack8

Stack8, founded roughly eight years ago, bills itself as a full-service enterprise collaboration partner of Cisco, focused on leveraging automation, integration, and consulting services for simplified provisioning around Cisco Webex Meetings and Webex Teams. For example, Stack8 will assess enterprise requirements, set up and test the system, and help manage it for maximum efficiency.

At Cisco Live, Stack8 showcased its Intelligent Booking System for reserving meeting rooms, which is part of the company’s Meeting Solutions portfolio and uses Cisco’s Webex Teams, Proximity, Exchange, and Graph. As Stack8 CTO Eric Losier showed me in a demo, enterprises can automate the room booking process in Webex Teams via the company’s virtual assistant bot, called Octo.

For example, via an integration with Cisco video endpoints, Octo is able to tell users if a room is free for a meeting. Further, if that room was reserved for an hour but the meeting only goes 30 minutes, Octo can pick up on that unused space and prompt the user to release the room reservation for others to use. Even further, for example, an executive could ask Octo to have fresh coffee delivered to a meeting room, in which case Octo will make a call to an assistant and relay the message.

Stack8’s flagship product, called SMACS — short for Stack8 Moves, Adds, and Changes System — is centered on speeding up to the migration to Cisco UC systems by enabling non-technical staff to handle user provisioning. Octo can come into play here, too, to offload the heavy-lifting of user provisioning from staff.