They say there's strength in numbers. How's this one for you?

Cisco's collaboration portfolio serves over 300 million people worldwide -and counting.

Our technology solutions are changing lives, setting the standard for how people connect, collaborate and create,every single day. And while I'm still relatively new to the company, I am living proof of the value of connections -in the business I founded, and in my personal and professional life.

Today, companies rely on technology to share content, communicate clearly, and co-create. Without this ability, the connections between colleagues -the moments that drive real value -are lost.

We take this responsibility seriously at Cisco, which is why, since joining the business in May, my team and I have been hard at work, addressing the most important ways to advance our technology adoption: cross operation among our products and interoperability with other existing solutions.

Simply put, our products have to work beautifully together. Because yes, while there is strength in numbers, often what might have become a meaningful experience can easily become a missed opportunity without the proper connectivity and communication between teams (who can forget this cringe-worthy parody of conference calls).

We've made great progress. Jabber and Webex Teams now work together so that customers wanting to move to persistent, cloud-based messaging can move group by group as they like instead of doing a hard cutover, which is insane.

We're building bridges, not islands. Lots and lots of bridges.

Small Teams, Big Impact

Consider huddle spaces.

These days, cubicles are out. People are using huddle spaces to collaborate informally with their teams in real time. Believe it or not, about 25 million huddle spaces exist today (and that number keeps growing).**

These smaller spaces provide a great place for employees to meet, but they often lack great technology. Good luck sharing your draft of that big presentation or asking your remote colleague for her feedback. Most huddle spaces are ill-equipped for tasks like these, let alone to offer consistent experiences between spaces and interfaces.

Today,these are table stakes.

Enter the brand-newWebex Room Kit Mini?. It is custom-made for smaller, more intimate spaces but includes the same AI, cameras and microphones that customers know and love in our bigger systems. It "wakes up" when you enter the room and fine-tunes the video so everyone in the space is visible.

For larger spaces where people want to whiteboard and co-create, we've created theWebex Board 55?. It's newly enhanced with features like browser access and third-party integrations are included right in the board to boot, too.

Now imagine you're standing over someone's shoulder to see what's on their laptop screen. How can you make these organic meetings more effective?Webex Share?can instantly turn any nearby TV or screen into a wireless presentation device when used with a Cisco Webex app via its palm-sized adapter, no cables needed.

These solutions are just a few of the other major innovations our Collaboration team revealed this week at Cisco's Partner Summit. To help customers get more great work done, we've also announced new cloud services and products, including the Cisco BroadCloud Calling andCisco Calling Appdelivered by leading service providers.

And we're just getting started.

Cisco Collaboration: Our Promise to Customers

In electrical engineering, a component either performs or it doesn't -marketing slogans can't make a chip run faster any more than they can integrate a complex network or create an engaging user-interface.

At Cisco, we want our customers' IT teams to be able to deploy, manage and scale our solutions with ease. We want their employees to reap the benefits of a unified and modern collaboration experience -for tools at work to be a pleasure to use.

In the coming year, Cisco Collaboration is committed to building bridges, not islands. We are simplifying how we work with partners and customers, equally supporting both premise and cloud environments and ensuring quality and predictability among our portfolio.  We'll do it across calling, contact center, video, meetings, and messaging -all in the name of meaningful experiences and even greater results.

People often ask me, "What was it that made you so excited to come and be part of the team here at Cisco?" Well, I'll tell you. It's the people -those I work with and those we have the privilege of serving and connecting through our solutions. All 300 million of them!

I'm excited to share our successes and our learnings over the course of this year.  In the meantime, I'd really like to know how our Collaboration portfolio is helping you and your business navigate this new digital world.

^{** Source:  Recon Research 2018}