Cisco’s Spark becomes a cloud-based phone and meeting platform

The release of Spark for developers begs the question of what the relationship is with Tropo, Cisco’s cPaaS solution.

A user who starts a video call from a conference-room system will be able to move to a mobile phone and then shift to another room system without missing anything, Mr. Trollope added. Cisco has partnered with Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and most strategically with Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), and has purchased a bevy of cloud companies in recent months to speed up its growth.

The evolved Cisco Spark is billed as a cloud-based business collaboration service that enables customers to message, meet and call anyone, anywhere and anytime, and is largely the brainchild of Jonathan Rosenberg, lead author and co-inventor of the Session Initiation Protocol and former chief technologist for Skype. The Spark service doesn’t include a public switched telephone network (PSTN), which users will still get via their service providers.

Availability and Pricing Cisco Spark for Developers and select services of Cisco Spark are available today. The company calls this a “zero-touch meeting” because no one has to set it up.

With today’s Spark announcement, the opportunity for Cisco partners is threefold: to grow their business via volume sales of both new customers and to up-sell existing customers; to profit via margin and recurring revenue, again by selling endpoints and services; and to differentiate their business with Spark for Developers.

But in a down day for the market overall, Cisco stock was down 1.5% in afternoon trading in the stock market today, near 26.50, about where shares have lingered for three weeks, 11% off their 52-week high of March 2. It isn’t really practically for two end users to jump on WebEx each and every time they need to talk.

Collaboration was a $4 billion business in Cisco’s most recently completed fiscal year, making it the company’s third-largest segment by revenue after switching and routing equipment.

The application is also created to make Cisco’s on-premise software more accessible via the cloud. Those tools are messaging, meeting and calling. “Cisco (is) announcing this whole hybrid approach to be able to connect in your legacy into the broader collaboration cloud play – whether it be Cisco’s cloud or a partner cloud … and also linked in with managed services to be able to bridge that gap is an extremely strong play for the channel”.

Chose add-on services: Rooms, audio conferencing, and additional centers, such as events, training, or support. Here’s what they had to say – positive and negative – about Cisco’s latest moves with Spark.

Spark can also be integrated into specific devices in the office that can be updated to run Spark as an operating system. For more information, visit: http://thenetwork.cisco.com. I’m sure there are more planned, but this initial release includes four hybrid services.

Finally, Wolfson talked about adoption services, which he said were critical.

“My team is passionate about making tools for work that are as simple and delightful as the tools we use at home”, said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Collaboration, Data Analytics and IoT groups.