The big announcement at Collaboration Summit in December 2015 was about Cisco reinventing the collaboration experience with Spark. In the past there have been separate tools for messaging, meeting and calling, with a disjointed user experience and in many cases limited integration between them. Cisco Spark now brings these three essential communications types into a single app, allowing people to collaborate seamlessly.
The Spark call capability allows you to make and receive phone calls in the Spark app, or from phones and video room systems registered to the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. You can start a call on your mobile and move it to a room system with a swipe. This is essentially an IP PBX in the cloud, with PSTN calling provided through service provider partners.
The question many customers and partners will now ask is what does this mean for Cisco’s on-premises UCM (Unified Communications Manager) and partner hosted HCS (Hosted Collaboration Solution). This is where Spark Hybrid Services come into play and I believe will provide the best of both worlds. The Spark call capability will be targeted for small businesses, however larger customers with more complex voice and video requirements will still be able to get the full Spark experience by using UCM or HCS as the call control in a hybrid call service solution.
Hybrid Services allow you to connect on-premises or partner hosted components securely to Spark capabilities in the cloud, through Hybrid Service Connector software modules deployed on-premises or in a partner cloud. Two examples of these Hybrid Services are Calendar Service and Directory Service. Calendar Service connects to Microsoft Exchange and allows you to create a Spark room or/and a WebEx meeting with all meeting invitees by adding “@spark” or/and “@webex” to a meeting invite. Directory Service connects to Active Directory, so you can see all company contacts in the Spark app.
Hybrid Call Services allow UCM and HCS to connect to Spark, with Call Service Aware and Call Service Connect capabilities. Call Service Aware provides Zero Touch Meetings – when you make a call from your phone, Spark automatically creates a meeting and you can share your desktop with a single click – and Deskphone Control – you can use your phone as the audio or video terminal for Spark, including joining meetings or making PSTN calls from Spark. Call Service Connect allows you to call contacts and PSTN numbers, as well as receive calls made to your enterprise number and see a unified call history, all within the Spark app.
These Hybrid Call Services allow customers to use the industry’s most comprehensive and mature enterprise voice and video solution, either deployed on-premises or in a partner’s cloud, but still take advantage of the Spark collaboration experience. If a customer wants a full cloud collaboration solution, with UCM as the call control, then the combination of Spark and HCS can provide this. Additionally, the open APIs provided by Spark for Developers allow customers, partners and ISVs to expand on these capabilities by integrating with other applications and developing custom applications. This combination of enterprise call control and SaaS from the Cisco Collaboration Cloud is truly the best of both worlds.
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