Wayne - Great ideas - I definitely agree with what you have there. I'm a Cisco employee - part of the Advanced Services team for Spark - so I've been living in the persistent messaging world of Spark for quite a while now and I think there's one key area that I believe is going to really propel Spark from being viewed as a persistent messaging APPLICATION to more of a persistent messaging PLATFORM. My thinking here is that the true value of Spark is the content and the interactions with that content. And while that exists today with the person-to-person chat & video, group chat & video, and doc sharing, once the API's are made publicly available (and some of the out-of-box 3rd party integrations are released) it will open a whole new area of content (and by virtue of that, enable a whole new way to use Spark). See my slide below - I use this with customers to help expand their thinking of what Spark is / can be. With these integrations, you totally change the game. It's not just about the people. It's about ANY data source - human or otherwise! I can have a "chat" with a corporate directory system by asking it what someone's phone number is. Or what their email address is. Or maybe I want to get a understanding of the latest sales opportunities in our sales systems. That's a possibility too. And it doesn't even have to be read only - it's INTERACTING with that data that's even more important. Maybe I want to update the status of sales opportunity - I could potentially do that by having a "chat" with our sales systems and tell it what I want it to do. So in a nutshell - it's those types of integrations that get me excited because of all the great use cases that it will unlock.
