Cisco and Dimension Data Announce Co-Innovation Partnership

Cisco and Dimension Data have announced a new co-innovation agreement, to develop a deeper collaboration environment and framework to jointly solve clients’ business needs. Drawing on their respective core strengths, competencies, and technologies, Cisco and Dimension Data are coming together to provide the scale and market-reach to transform ideas into viable, deployable solutions.

As part of the multi-year agreement, both companies plan to utilize Cisco’s global network of Co-Innovation Centres to drive collaboration in key areas such as 5G, Internet of Things, and Blockchain. Additionally, the two companies will continue to enrich and expand their Connected Conservation program that is leveraging sophisticated solutions to protect and better the planet, endangered animals, and their communities. 

Working closely to innovate beyond traditional products to solve business and operational challenges will allow both companies to drive more ambitious projects and outcomes. They share a vision of tapping into their deep pools of existing technology and co-innovating with customers and the broader ecosystem to meet client needs as they arise and deliver enhanced capabilities in an agile fashion. 

“This partnership means we’re in a stronger position to research, test and develop new offerings at a speed beyond the traditional market cycle,” said Ettienne Reinecke, Chief Technology Officer, Dimension Data. “By creating a deeper collaboration environment, we will share and leverage our intellectual property, including products and code, allowing us to move faster with a focus on applied innovation to challenge the art of the possible, which will result in some exciting innovations for our clients.”

Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer, Dave Ward added, “Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it requires diverse skill sets and multiple points of view. Co-innovation as a formal, structured process with our ecosystem, including  partners and customers is part of our foundation simply because the market demands it. It’s a way to speed the innovation , allowing us to move at the speed of digital and adopt startup methodologies to bring products and solutions into being.” 

Cisco and Dimension Data have over 28 years of experience working together, bringing to market a technology portfolio that offer solutions from the cloud to the data centre, and all the way out to the edge. The focus remains delivering new customer experiences, transforming processes and business models, and empowering workforce innovation. 

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There’s a Billion Ways to Use Cisco Webex Board

The Digital Whiteboard for Modern Business Challenges

“A thing of beauty, isn’t it? All written out like this?” Those are the words of Douglas Mason, talking with Taylor Mason in the March 31 episode of Billions, the hugely popular high-stakes drama about finance and power that airs on Showtime. Billions dramatizes the lives and conflicts of a collection of characters who occupy the very top canopy of the financial jungle. These are people who wrestle over countless complex deals, trades, and companies, and who consequently count their victories and their personal wealth in billions of dollars. And they use Webex for digital whiteboarding and rich media team collaboration.

The Webex Board Fits Right In for Team Collaboration!

The setting and structure of the Taylor Mason Capital office is clean and sleek. There is a sense of control and momentum in the people and the building. This is a place where business gets done. Every element of the surroundings is there to ensure their hand-picked team is capable of nothing but the best. So of course there’s a Webex Board there. The very presence of this all-in-one-device digital whiteboard speaks volumes: it’s as natural for this team of brilliant people to have this Webex Board already in place as it is for them to have top-notch security and collaboration devices surrounding them, and top-of-class professionals working with them.

The Webex Board from Cisco is just one of our flagship video collaboration tools, and it’s one we’re extremely proud of. It’s not just for jet-set billionaires, of course, and that’s something else we are proud of. It’s affordable and accessible for all types of businesses. The quality is there for everyone to use. And it always delivers. It has leapfrogged out of the pool of traditional “electronic whiteboards” and demonstrates just how well and how deeply it can pull human ingenuity into the sphere of connected technology, and then push it out the other side with ideas, creativity, and productivity clearly enhanced.

The Webex Board is in fact much more than a digital whiteboard. It also provides the same video conferencing and wireless presentation screen sharing services that are supported on our other rich media collaboration devices like the Webex DX 80 and Webex Room series.  Using the Webex Teams app, even remote users calling in from a PC or mobile device can join the meeting to drive important business forward. And that’s what this is about: bringing more intelligence and usability to meeting rooms of any size. It’s the beginning of a whole new era of team collaboration.

Intelligent Collaboration is Critical in Modern Business

Billions might be a fictional show, and Taylor Mason Capital a fictional firm, but as with many riveting dramas produced by Showtime and others, they reflect the issues of the day, and have both feet firmly planted in today’s realities.

Collaboration is more critical than ever. Teams must be able to meet, collaborate, and work through ideas and problems quickly. It is not realistic to rely on outdated meeting techniques and analog tools. People must get on the same page right away, to foster understanding without ambiguity, and maximize output in a way that exceeds the “sum of the parts.”

Today’s tools – from videoconferencing and digital whiteboarding to rich media collaboration and wireless sharing – must be accessible enough, intelligent enough, and flexible enough to ensure that every person is in the loop, whether they are all in the same room or spread out across the globe. Every one of them must be able to participate to the fullest.

The Lesson: The Intimacy of Collaboration

New, intelligent Webex technologies play an intimate role in solving problems and communicating. They become part of the people who use them, proactively recognizing and understanding faces, words, and context in a way that no other productivity devices have been able to do.

Meetings have used visual tools for decades, from flip charts to PowerPoint to videoconferencing. But until now these tools have been static and inflexible, conditioning others to dread meetings rather than strive for a substantive outcome.

What the Webex Board does is show just how effortlessly and seamlessly the technology fits into the thinking patterns and actions of the people in the room. In this Billions scene, there are just the two of them, but there could easily be more people, in other rooms in other buildings and cities digital whiteboarding in real time with Taylor and Douglas, solving problems, sharing the insight in an uninterrupted, maximized workflow that will lead to exemplary progress in the meeting and beyond.

People should no longer just move from point to point, instead you move along a continuum of creativity, with communication being the permanent center.