Cisco Meeting Server is now available. This new offering brings together all the great scalability and interoperability that we acquired with Acano earlier this year. And it adds more value through integration with the broader Cisco collaboration portfolio.

I've had the opportunity to meet with customers to get perspective about what they need from collaboration tools to make their organizations successful. They shared priorities including:

• Enjoyable, high-quality meeting experiences that incorporate great video, audio, and content-sharing capabilities
• The ability for anyone to join a meeting easily, whether from a room system, desktop system, or mobile device via app or browser.
• Scalability so that IT managers can meet existing needs and extend as business needs grow.
• Super-simple and predictable licensing that makes it easy to enable services for all users and only pay for those using the solution.

Our focus with Cisco Meeting Server aligns with this wish list. We've emphasized making it as easy as possible for anyone to meet and enjoy a great video, audio, and content-sharing experience. We've simplified the licensing as much as possible so that you can turn up services for users easily. All this is built on a highly scalable and interoperable platform. We've simplified the ability for anyone to join a meeting from video endpoints, and any platform including PC, Mac, iOS, Android and Skype for Business.

https://youtu.be/sfQwknTQZrM

Cisco Meeting Server includes:

• Integration with Cisco Unified Communications Manager:This enables capabilities like escalating a 1:1 call to a multiparty conference, and easy connections using Cisco Jabber.
• Scheduling meetings using Cisco TelePresence Management Suite:Included support for "one-button-to-push" simplifies joining meetings from room or desktop video systems -and extends to Skype for Business. Importantly, the native experience for both Skype for Business and video endpoint users is preserved.
• A new high-capacity Cisco UCS-based server:Cisco Meeting Server 1000 offers virtualized software deployment with 96 simultaneous HD calls per server.
• Multiparty Licensing:Our all-in-one user-based license model now includes Personal Multiparty Plus, which is part of Cisco Unified Workspace Licensing (CUWL) Meetings, and Shared Multiparty Plus.

To make meetings truly open, whether inside or beyond your organization, users can join a meeting from Cisco Meeting App. The app works natively on smartphones, PCs, or any WebRTC-compatible browser.

And there's more. We harnessed the great scaling technology that Acano developed to provide optimized geographic distribution. It works by deploying Meeting Servers in different data centers and ensuring that users are connected to their "home/local" Meeting Server when they join a meeting. Then we optimize the bandwidth usage between sites to reduce costs.

All-in-all, it is great to be able to share this announcement and already see positive industry reaction.

It's an exciting time for video collaboration. As always, we want to thank the engineering teams, partners, and customers who continue to help us to evolve our solutions.

Visit the Cisco Meeting Server product page and let us know your thoughts in the comments below.