Louis - Conversations with customer regarding Jabber vs Project Squared

[Tommer Catlin]

Hi Louis -

Almost everyone is familiar with Jabber and Lync and their use case scenarios, work flow etc.    What type of message or discussion should we be having with customers on how Project Squared replaces or compliments Jabber and or Lync.   For me, I have never really dived into Google Hangouts or Unify or these persistent type chat document sharing experiences. 

It would be interesting to hear from your group on how or where this plays into the workspace today who currently have an IM/P applications in place.   I know its a different thought process or "way we can collaborate", but its a tough conversation.   Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Tommer

[lpratt]

Tommer,

Alot of the focus now is around the agile worker.  The nature of work is changing, in part due to the emergence of the agile worker, as well as the integrated value chains, and impact of technology, into the business process.  These workers are creating and sharing ideas and content rapidly, interacting with colleagues inside and outside their organization from anywhere, and using the devices of their choice.

Project Squared is the place where teams can post messages, share content, and meet face to face in an open space accessible from nearly any device, anywhere in the world.  Essentially, a virtual conference room that is created for all teams with everything everyone needs to do their work together.

Regarding your specific ask around Jabber ... for our many on-­‐premise and UC customers, Jabber is the best UC client.  We have invested in creating consistent Jabber 10.x Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android clients that are feature rich and easy to deploy.  Customers who require Unified Communications and Presence services should continue using Jabber.  Project Squared should not be considered as a replacement for Jabber, and it has been designed to integrate and coexist with Jabber.

The easiest way to experience this is to start using Project Squared across devices, http://www.projectsquared.com/

It has been launched as a project and we are looking for feedback around what works well, what needs improvement, and we encourage you to use the 'Send Feedback' option, that is part of the application, often to provide feedback.

Louis

[George Thomas]

Louis, the way I hear it is, Project Squared will be another app in addition to Jabber + WebEx for the enterprise. If you need IM/P use Jabber, if you need meetings capability use WebEx, and if you need to work as a team use Project Squared. Are there any plans to merge these functionalities into a single app regardless of if the customer has a cloud/on-prem infrastructure? To me, it sounds like a 3rd silo.

[miro@cisco.com]

George, the platform supporting the Project Squared client is very capable of integrating the experiences together. Today you may see it as "a 3rd silo", however as demonstrated at the Collaboration Summit during some technology preview demos, the technology is capable of integrating the jabber IM to Squared, integrated calendar on your mobile device to have capabilities to display and cross launch the WebEx meeting, OL scheduling simplifies the room+meeting creation and the hybrid deployments will allow use of the on-prem devices to be integrated with the mobile and cloud registered devices.  This is just beginning of our journey and there is more to come. Our focus is on the integration of the existing experience and making the future experience better with inclusion of the current/existing investment.

[George Thomas]

Thanks Miro. Cross launching of apps in my opinion is not the best user experience, reason being the user needs to make sure that the app is installed on their devices and in some cases, the credentials entered and updated. Today, if a user wants to start a 3 party meeting, they have to switch to the WebEx app, to IM a 4th person during a meeting, switch to the Jabber app. Jumping between apps doesn't give the user a consistent end user experience. I realize that Project squared is in its early stages but just wanted to make sure that a single app is being considered instead of cross launching. I didn't see any "presence indicators" in Project Squared hence speculating that to see presence status, a different app will be required. Just my 2c.

[miro@cisco.com]

George, today if you have room with less than 8 participants, you can escalate that room conversation to full video meeting with all 8 participants w/o leaving the application. If you use Mac desktop client, you can share desktop, the windows option and FireFox browser option to share desktop are coming soon. The presence indicator in Project Squared is in the different form, not traditional Cisco presence/IM status, but rather in the SMS/Messenger style status, indicating that user have viewed your message or typing the message back to you. Yes, we are considering the single app option, however this may not cover all user stories. As Louis pointed out, each of the apps have a specific set of use cases and we are diligently working on the integrated user experience as well as considering the existing customer investment. Thank you for the great feedback and conversation.

[George Thomas]

Miro, thanks for the explanation. One last request I have is enabling presence in Project squared. I like the idea of not having persistent presence connectivity for the apps since it doesnt consume battery, leave the app running without closing out however if a customer really would like to get presence integrated into Squared, they should atleast have an option for the integration instead of having Jabber just for presence. It doesnt have to enabled natively but should be an option. Thanks again!

[admin11111]

I agree with g_thomas123's comments. Even though each app (Webex, Jabber, Proj Squared, Telepresence) all have their own set of use cases, it is very important to tie them up in to a suite offering. It is fine to sell a specific app or an use case to a customer but in the world of collaboration, most customers prefer to buy a complete Collaboration Suite rather than bits and pieces of use cases. A complete suite offering would take a customer from virtual telepresence to team collaboration to webex video collaboration to text chatting (jabber) to document collaboration all the way till asynchronous communication and collaboration. Microsoft does this with their Lync, Office 365, Yammer/Sharepoint.

A complete Cisco collaboration experience is much needed and I think integrating all of these including Project Squared in to Jive or IBM Connections is a great way of providing end-to-end collaboration suite that meets most corporate needs. Personally, I think it is hard to explain, let alone sell Project Squared standalone to corporations.

[Taranjit Singh Dhaliwal]

+1 to what Tommer said.

Jabber with expressway offers the same functinality with on-prem hardware/infra. Merge Jabber/Spark products into:

- Jabber/Spark Premises

- Jabber/Spark Cloud

Also aligns with CMR naming.