Cisco Webex Meetings successfully supported our organisation implementing a mandatory work from home response to the pandemic

We use Cisco Webex Meetings across the entire organisation to enable collaboration between geographically disparate teams. It allows us to have voice and video conference calls, screen sharing, and instant messaging chats between team members who are working from home and team members working in the office, and also team members who work in different regions and even countries. We also use Cisco Webex Meetings in our physical office conference rooms, to provide a telephony and video conferencing solution that supports meetings between physically co-located employees and remotely located employees.

We have completed our initial deployment of an hybrid work solution based on Cisco Webex and related products. Previously users had desktop phones, and have been smoothly transitioned to using software based Webex calling. The integration of the different Webex components has enabled better and easier collaboration with remote team members. We can now easily add or dial in additional Webex meeting participants on the fly and the user experience is much better than our previous solution which did not cater for remote work.

Our organisation had already deployed a number of competing solutions to enable remote collaboration and work, such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom, Skype. Thus the main organizational challenge we faced was choosing and then applying a single unified toolset / product set and approach for supporting remote work. Some users liked Teams and others like Skype and others like Webex, however given Cisco's suite of integrated software and phone and in room conferencing products, we settled on the Cisco approach so that our room conferencing systems and remote work conferencing and calling systems were all part of the same integrated suite.

Aligning and deploying a single unified and integrated suite of software and hardware products has providing savings in terms of effort to support the environments and solution, and savings in terms of training of our end users in one product suite, and further savings in terms of licensing and vendor support costs.

Liberating the worker from the office has increased employee satisfaction in our organisation (we conducted surveys before and after our remote / hybrid work initiative was rolled out), which in turn increases talent retention and is a good story for our organisation to tell in terms of talent recruitment. My personal experience is that the ability to work from the office or home with the same toolset means that I can deliver outcomes to the organisation just in time. Previously I would have to commute to the office to have access to our production systems and provide support for our users, whereas now I can provide support easily and at any time wherever I happen to be when a support call comes in.

We chose Cisco's Webex and related products to support our organization's hybrid work environment because Cisco provides great in room conferencing equipment that integrates seamlessly with the Webex calling and conferencing software that our end users employ on their desktop and laptop and personal devices from the office and when working remotely. Having a single unified and integrated suite of hardware and software that extends from conference rooms and board rooms all the way down to personal desktop and laptop and mobile devices was key to selecting Cisco for our hybrid work solution.