Exactly one year back, we had brought you the news of a fresh Microsoft Teams-Cisco integration that would allow interoperability between Webex devices and Teams. These erstwhile competitors joined forces to build a solution that was more than the sum of its parts, and there has been no looking back. This year, at Microsoft Ignite 2020, the company announced another move that will tighten the partnership with Cisco: cloud video interoperability.
Why Video Matters Today
The number of video calls witnessed a massive spike in the last few months, increasing almost 10X times between January and April (UK). In the face of lockdowns and social distancing, video turned out to be extremely popular in both personal and professional use cases. Today, even as we explore ways to unlock, there is no forgetting the convenience and seamlessness of cloud-based video calling.
Video conferencing at scale could save companies millions in travel and infrastructure costs while opening up new audiences. Clearly, Microsoft plans to capitalise on this opportunity during and beyond the pandemic.
What is the New Partnership All About?
To be clear, Microsoft hasn’t only made an incremental improvement to its video capabilities – the partnership goes far deeper. At Ignite, Microsoft announced Azure networking enhancements that introduce native support for Cisco SD-WAN within the Azure Virtual WAN hubs. It is now available in preview, letting you optimise your central policies and path selection. Further, Microsoft has launched a Global Load Balancer to improve traffic distribution on the cloud.
Coming to video interoperability, Microsoft updated its documentation in September of 2020 to reflect its new capabilities on Teams. Cloud video interoperability works for any company deploying 50+ video devices, looking to retain the value from this investment, while also gaining from Teams’ rich collaboration features.
In addition to Cisco, cloud video interop is available for select Poly, Pexip, and BlueJeans solutions. The following list gives you some more detail:
