The new service brings together the collaboration tools offered by Cisco Spark with the voice services of the BT One Cloud Cisco platform.
Cisco Spark is a hosted collaboration application, providing team messaging, online meetings, voice and video calling and interactive drawing. The service uses end-to-end encryption for added security and is provided on a subscription basis with customers paying per-user-per-month. This allows services to be added on demand.
The combination of Cisco Spark with the BT One Cloud Cisco platform’s voice services helps customers reduce costs by automatically routing calls via the One Cloud network, avoiding or reducing international call charges.
BT also offers the option of using Cisco Spark Board, a new business collaboration device fully integrated into the One Cloud Collaborate Spark service. Spark Board is available at launch as a 55 inch presentation screen that also acts as a digital whiteboard and video conferencing tool.
Andrew Small, vice president, unified communications and collaboration, customer relationship management and mobility at Global Services, BT, said: “Our research shows that improving collaboration across the business is one of the key factors in determining the success of digital transformation. BT One Collaborate Spark helps our customers create productive digital environments for their employees while reducing the cost of international calls. It gives their employees the ability to collaborate more simply and intuitively regardless of where they are or what devices they’re using.”
“Cisco and BT have enjoyed a successful relationship for over 25 years bringing together our expertise to offer innovation to cloud-based collaboration tools,” said Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager, IoT and applications, Cisco. “We’re delighted that BT customers will now be able to message, meet, and call anyone, anywhere, anytime, through this intuitive, complete collaboration Spark service.”