Daniel J SaitCisco sellers can now offer a multi-share experience enabling up to 10x the content-sharing capability in meeting spaces with Mezzanine.
Oblong Industries, Inc., maker of multi-stream collaboration solutions and interactive spatial computing environments, has announced its flagship product, Mezzanine, is available globally on the Cisco Global Price List as a part of the Cisco SolutionsPlus Program. This means that Cisco’s channel partners can now purchase Mezzanine through Cisco’s Global Price List (GPL) to streamline ordering process.
With more enterprises experiencing demand for accelerated business productivity in an increasingly competitive marketplace – one driven by reams of real-time data and impacted by evolving regulations and tight labor markets – superior workplace tools to help business leaders surface insights and keep staff engaged, empowered, and in sync are vitally important, argue the partners.
Mezzanine complements Cisco Webex videoconferencing and collaboration solutions by enhancing the content sharing capabilities of meeting room environments. Mezzanine was created to unite display surfaces and transform them into a flexible canvas for multiple users and multiple streams of content simultaneously. In addition to the benefit for presentation, the platform is designed to offer ‘meeting democracy’ where collaborators in a room, in connected rooms, or working remotely all have the ability to control and contribute to a shared workspace.
“We’ve worked closely with Cisco over the last year to bring the dynamic multi-share capabilities of Mezzanine’s fluid UI to the Cisco suite of enterprise solutions for teamwork,” comments Oblong CEO John Underkoffler. “With Mezzanine now on the GPL Cisco sellers have the means to truly transform the collaborative capabilities of the conferencing solutions already placed with their customers, and to specify the most capable and exhilarating collaboration solutions for every new briefing center, meeting room, and huddle space. We are excited to share these innovations with the Cisco community, and to share the knowledge that, given the opportunity to share content streams simultaneously, people will.”
Data driven
Usage statistics gleaned with the permission of Oblong’s customers indicate that when meeting participants are sharing content streams in Mezzanine, more than 60% of the time two or more streams of content are being shared at a time, and 25% of the time four or more streams of content are being shared. The company argues this is a strong indication of the value end users place on being able to see their multiple data sources simultaneously. With the addition of Mezzanine to the Cisco meeting environment the sharing capacity increases up to ten-fold, from a single shared stream of content to up to 10 streams at once.
Mezzanine also extends the Cisco Webex meeting experience with enhanced content collaboration capabilities and more flexible utilisation of on-screen real estate. There are three software SKUs on the GPL for the Mezzanine 200 Series, 300 Series, and 600 Series solutions. These SKU’s carry a Cisco-first experience, blending multi-share capabilities into the Cisco Webex interface.
API integration automates standard call functions including dialing, answering, hang-up, and content sharing so users can connect and get to work in familiar fashion with the same Cisco style walk-up experience as before. The new UI is also designed to make it easier for users to discover multi-share, and to share multiple streams of content simultaneously. Calls to action and an on-screen prompts guide users to the new capabilities of the joint offering.
For more information on this joint venture, click here.