If you were in Vegas November 13-15, 2018, the chances of you enjoying the festivities at a casino or relaxing in the abundant amount of highly-rated spas for a little rest and relaxation were high. Alternatively though, you could have been one of the thousand attendees at the highly anticipated, and highly regarded Cisco Partner Summit 2018, an invite-only, annual educational event dedicated to learning the latest innovative solutions and strategies around enterprise networking, security, cloud and collaboration.
While the Partner Summit promises a high-level overview of products and solutions, we walked away with one big takeaway: huddle rooms are taking over.
Workers are no longer confined to the spaces of a traditional desk and collaboration in a fluid environment is on the rise and companies are having to keep up with the demand of wanting more non-traditional spaces. In fact, 93% of employees state they need more huddle spaces. With employee morale and bottom lines being impacted, it’s no wonder that organizations, including Cisco are taking the time necessary to ensure that the highly requested huddle-style room are ubiquitous.
Even with the revolution that the huddle room brings, Cisco revealed at the Summit that huddle rooms have only just begun transforming the workplace. The reason is simple: little to no collaboration technology in the spaces. 60% of tech professionals want full visibility into huddle space utilization, wanting to know how often it’s being used, which technology if any is being used, how often it’s reserved and how many people are in each meeting. Employee frustration is rampant. Employees are clamoring for ways to remain creative, engaging and innovative without the constraints that a typical meeting room offers. A huddle space provides a different collaborative environment, one of which that allows a more intimate brainstorming session to take place, or a small team to collaborate on an ongoing project without feeling like they need to be in a typical conference room. Organizations want simple cost effective collaboration technologies to implement and adopt the use of huddle rooms, but, without technology they find themselves forced back into the meeting room and the small, creative bubble is put on hold.
Having little to no collaboration technology in huddle rooms comes down to cost. When an organization plans out a budget, huddle rooms, being on the rise and not fully implemented or adopted yet, are often left out of the IT budget. However, Cisco accepts the challenge with a cohesive huddle portfolio that is key to enabling digital workplace transformation and that fits into every budget.
Cisco Partner Summit introduced some key features of their new Cisco Webex Room Kit Mini that offers the same dependable, great user experiences as the room kits for those larger meeting rooms. Designed specifically for huddle spaces, the new room kits offer:
At the Summit, Amy Chang, Senior Vice President of Collaboration Technology for Cisco, explained the excitement behind their new Room Kit Mini and we couldn’t be more excited to work right alongside them. Our Workspace Insights software provides invaluable visibility into any meeting space, huddle rooms included.
Users get a full view of how a room is being used, including, video conferencing, audio calls, and non-call activity like presentation share. Building upon the highly anticipated Cisco Room Kit feature of people count, Workspace Insights take it a step further allowing users to discover how many people attended a meeting, or when a meeting was missed all in one single pane of glass. This type of room efficiency insights optimizes huddle room space, and maximizes the ROI on the room technology that the IT team worked so hard to budget for.
At the Summit, It was surreal to hear Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer talk about how Vyopta is building things that Cisco should have built. Knowing that Cisco fully supports our initiatives, you can bet that Vyopta will continue working on evolving our product portfolio to ensure that collaboration remains a forefront at every organization, continuing with the Workspace Insights product and its’ newly released features. As for Cisco, we can’t wait to see innovative solutions they have in the works and their announcements during Cisco Partner Summit 2019.
Cisco’s Room Kit Mini partnered with Vyopta’s Workspace Insights is truly paving the way for a more collaborative future; extending the visibility to all huddle rooms that are going to continue to rise throughout 2019. This type of technology is a game changer, enabling all organizations to analyze their conference room and huddle space utilization for a more efficient, data-driven future.
Learn more about how Vyopta is changing the game when it comes to room analytics.Try Workspace Insights today!