When I started at Cisco 6 months ago I made one thing clear to the leadership team that acquired my business, Tropo: “If you want to build a great platform for Cisco Spark, you’d better do it with a developer-centric approach first, not as an add-on later. Designing for developers as a first class user of the platform is a must.”
As I wrote last week, my team’s approach to building a rock solid platform is:
- A great developer experience
- Amazing support
- Deliver business value
These key tenets helped us make Tropo a successful developer platform; now a fast-growing business entity within Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group. Today, we apply this approach and launch Cisco Spark for Developers.
While we are just getting started with what we are calling a ‘Preview,’ we already have some pretty awesome examples of how our APIs are being used to add value to existing solutions. And in some cases, these vendors are using both Spark and Tropo together to deliver truly transformative end user experiences:
- Altocloud: Altocloud, a digital customer engagement platform, has integrated Cisco Spark to connect inside sales teams and customers at the right time in the journey with secure messaging spaces.
- Tagnos: Tagnos improves the patient journey by automatically creating Spark rooms for hospital staff to view and comment on patient status – Tropo voice and SMS services are added to the workflow to drive operational execution.
- Qwasi: is a customer loyalty and engagement platform that embeds Tropo APIs to enable two-way text and call services into B2C marketing campaigns. Now, Spark rooms pop up to notify team members of hot leads, giving them a spot to chat immediately but search later to review progress.
- Zendesk: Move the team off of email and into a Spark room where they can collaborate on a customer service ticket, hop on a video call, and solve tickets faster.
These examples are just the beginning. We want all of YOU to use our platforms to build amazing things for your customers. If you need help, just ask. We’ve had discussions with many partners who have already started to get their hands dirty with our APIs. From what I’ve seen, they are going to make their customers (and end users) very, very happy. Stay tuned as we share more information very soon.
Think that’s all? No way. Look out for a follow-up blog by Tropo CTO Jose de Castro to give you a tour of the Cisco Spark for Developers portal.
Happy coding!
Jason Goecke, General Manager Tropo Business Unit
