[Imagine the scene: Alex, a Cisco employee who works in marketing is about to furiously type to her agency contact on Jabber IM. She’s found a quiet corner to work in a cinema management office...] Alex: Hey Sarah – are you there? Sarah: Hi! Yes, what’s up? Alex: I’m at the Jabber launch and the popcorn boxes haven’t arrived from the printer... Sarah: Oh! Alex: I’m supposed to be serving a cinema full of VIPs popcorn RIGHT NOW but I can’t without the boxes. They’re all looking at me, and I can tell they’re hungry. HELP!!! *** This fortunately wasn’t the situation faced by the marketing team at a Cisco Jabber launch event.  It was however a mock scenario proposed in a short film to Cisco customer cinema goers with a demonstration on how Cisco Jabber could help resolve this kind of issue. Want to know how Cisco Jabber solved the popcorn crisis?  All is explained in this short video. Using a short film and demos, the Cisco Collaboration team launched Cisco Jabber in cinemas across Australia & New Zealand, Thailand, Korea and India. Over 2,500 customers and partners watched as team members worked together to locate the temporarily mis-laid popcorn boxes using video, IM and voice on mobile devices as well as desktop and even immersive video with Cisco TelePresence. Customers then kicked back to enjoy a movie preview -- with their popcorn! Interested in seeing how a popcorn crisis was averted using Cisco Jabber - in Korean? Watch to see how the action un-ravelled. Want to know more? Make sure you follow ongoing discussions around Cisco Jabber on Twitter -http://twitter.com/ciscocollab using #cisco or #ciscojabber or visit www.cisco.com/go/jabber. ... View more

In a recent Collaboration Summit in Delhi, India, CIOs shared their insight around issues such as the importance of interoperability and mobility in the workplace as well as employee benefits experienced when deploying collaborative technologies. Visit an earlier recap to read some of the themes covered. With Bryan Tantzen, Senior Director Strategy & Customer Transformation for Cisco in the frontline, a CIO Q&A was hosted to continue the discussion.  One of the common questions was around how companies are currently collaborating, a hot topic given that the collaboration technology market in India experienced 22% growth in 2011 (Frost & Sullivan). Watch what he had to say in the video excerpt below. Cognizant, a leading systems integrator, is a company taking up the challenge and using immersive video such as TelePresence and video at the desktop to communicate globally.  Cognizant deployed video collaboration to drive internal executive and leadership meetings, client meetings and even client delivery. The company has not only been able to reduce cost but also reduce carbon emissions by 23% (35964 metric tons to 27738 metric tons) in one year even as their business grew 16%. Bryan continues with Cisco itself as an example of a company applying collaboration technology and process to improve its own sales and operations response times – in some cases from days, to under an hour. How are you or your company starting to collaborate?  Does this reflect the way that you’re heading?  Comment below or drop a line to @ciscocollab or @ciscoindia on Twitter. ... View more

Cisco recently hosted Collaboration Summits in Singapore and India to meet with CIOs from different verticals and several countries.  Over 150 executives attended from across the two countries as well as from Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines.  They came together to discuss and explore their strategies for collaboration, defined during the Summits, as a means of enabling employees to connect, inform, share and create with others using video, voice, desktop sharing and IM.  This could mean anywhere on any device. Feedback from CIOs on how they are either planning or starting to use collaboration demonstrated that while enterprises are at varying stages of deploying mobile collaboration, it’s on the roadmap for most.  Here’s a wrap-up of some of the key views... Mobility and interoperability are key We’re now living in a business and technology environment where more iPhones are distributed globally than babies born per annum . CIOs are starting to plan and incorporate mobility into their roadmaps in line with this trend. CIO India magazine, a media partner at the Delhi Summit reported that participants placed significant emphasis on the importance of enhancing user experience on employees’ mobile devices. At the same time, technical interoperability in the mobile space, scored highly as a discussion topic. While the desktop Operating Systems (OS) marketplace is largely owned by Microsoft and has remained largely consistent from 2011-2012, there is greater variety in the mobile landscape with iOS and Android dominating Q1 2012 smartphone shipments (IDC 2012). To counter this, Gopal Rangaraj, VP of IT, Reliance Life Sciences thought that CIOs “should create OS upgrade roadmaps to tackle the different types of devices that are entering the enterprise space.”  Tamal Chakravorty, CIO Ericsson India , continued “ Collaboration should enable co-existence ... it is vital to integrate the different aspects of the technology into a single fabric .” People are at the heart of the Collaboration Journey Questions about how to demonstrate tangible Return On Investment (ROI) on collaboration were asked that we’ll cover more in a later blog post with video from a speaker on the ground. However, CIOs were aware of the harder to measure benefits effects of Collaboration in the work environment for employees.  According to Sebastian Joseph, EVP & Head IT, Mudra Group " creating togetherness across teams, enhancing user-experience, and providing users with a feel good factor are critical.” CIO panellists also unanimously agreed that once organisations get users on their side, it becomes easier to tackle the challenges faced in the roll out of new collaboration infrastructure and processes. For further CIO commentary, visit CIO India magazine’s event coverage . What do you think? What issues are you looking to address in your own collaboration roadmap? Let us know below. *** Credit and thanks to P.V Krishna, Collaboration Marketing for Cisco India and CIO India magazine.  You can follow ongoing discussions on this subject by following @ciscocollab or @ciscoindia on Twitter. ... View more