Cisco’s new Spark Flex Plan enhances the Ubiety business model

Back in December 2015 I wrote a post called Will Cisco’s Acano acquisition + Spark kill Ubiety? that laid out what we believed the strategy would be for Cisco’s Acano acquisition and what it meant for our cloud Acano interoperability collaboration bridging service Ubiety.

The great news is Ubiety is going from strength to strength. October has been our largest month ever, Q3 our largest quarter ever and 2016 will be our largest year ever. But most importantly financials aside our customers, partners and Cisco love the service we deliver.

The innovation that the Acano solution brought to the video collaboration market was unprecedented for interoperability, quality and scale and as a specialist cloud provider of this technology we’ve really nailed service delivery on a global basis with some really unique differentiators like unlimited virtual meeting rooms, unlimited port options and unlimited global phone conferencing included.

We’ve been building great relationships with the global Cisco collaboration teams and positioning Ubiety and cloud endpoint registrations in the customer accounts that make the most sense (generally Skype4b and/or SIP endpoint heavy customers that need interop, phone conferencing and scale).

So what has changed in the last 11 months? Has Cisco stood still with development of the Acano based technology?

Far from it….. The integration between Cisco infrastructure products like UCM, Expressway, TMS is much tighter and you will see some really interesting unique features coming later this month.

(and we’ve recently up’d Ubiety meeting space capacity to 40 participants per meeting by default).

On the Spark side:

Spark has grown in capability and video quality over the last year; the feature list is becoming incredible and truly is starting to shine as an all in one message, meet and call platform. With very important developer tools and integrations that help us differentiate our offering from any other partner’s.

We have some big audacious ideas!!! Starting with our relatively simple integration with Spark and Ubiety/CMS, but spanning into some big secret grand plans for the future. Watch this space!

Another area I'm extremely passionate about is design and User Interface. It's great to see the Spark UI mature and take some design cues from our friends at Acano (well done Jonas, Torkel & team); you’ll see a lot more on this soon.

Yesterday Rowan announced some great new Spark features too, one of my favorites including the “Hybrid Media Service” which means a customer can deploy a localized Spark node on-premise, allowing on-net calls without leaving the network, but when external participants join the call, they connect via the public Spark cloud and the call cascades with a single HD connection per conference and maintains correct layouts for all.

(image originally published on no jitter)

Also looking forward, and without giving too much away we’ve seen where the Spark platform is going (as Rowan references in this blog post), new devices will be transformative for the meeting room experience. But in our eyes collaboration endpoints are still essentially a window into a larger platform and Spark will give us the opportunity to develop and customize this meeting and collaboration experience as we see fit to match our customer's business process requirements and platforms (Ubiety, Slack, Skype4b, Microsoft Teams, CRM etc).

Very interesting times!

And how is this all purchased going forward?

From the start we’ve always believed in simple, flexible user-based pricing. Ubiety or Spark can be purchased as independent monthly recurring services. Customers can even start with Ubiety if just interested in cloud bridging and transition over to Spark for full UC mid-contract with no financial penalty.

However what really excites us is the new “Cisco Spark Flex Plan”. What this means is for an entire organization, for one single low cost OPEX monthly payment, can get Spark (message, meet, cloud call), Cisco Meeting Server licenses, WebEx, UCM licenses, unlimited endpoint registrations and unlimited CMS hosting and global phone conferencing (hosted in Collaboration Squared datacenters).

This is an unprecedented offer that will dramatically reduce customers’ total cost of ownership for collaboration, conferencing, telephony and communications.

We can even use Cisco financial credits of existing UCM purchases to put towards the new enterprise subscription so customers don't double pay for existing on-prem licenses, even if purchased from a different Cisco partner.

The clear advantage Collaboration Squared brings to the table with this flex plan is the deep dedicated cloud collaboration expertise, but also the fact that all the Cisco Meeting Server hosting and global phone conferencing is included in the fixed rate (even Cisco themselves don’t provide this). And the beauty of this subscription is you can mix, match, swap, replace and upgrade any of the services at anytime during the term with $0 extra cost!

In summary

So if you have any of the following scenarios…..

• A need to solve the problem of interoperability across video endpoints, Skype4b/Jabber/Spark, web guests & phone conferencing
• Want to explore the capabilities of the Spark platform across message/meet/call
• Have a WebEx contract renewal in the next 6 months
• Have separate phone, web & video conferencing bridging vendors and want to consolidate
• Desire to move from on-prem to cloud in a phased approach
• Or want to reduce spend enterprise wide and simplify collaboration costs to a single simple monthly OPEX payment

Get in touch with me directly at [email protected]; we’d love to have an open and honest conversation about your requirements and see if we can potentially help.

Also we’d love to show you (under NDA) the next generation of Cisco products and get you first in line for priority ordering.

Please leave your thoughts and comments on this post and reach out anytime.

Best,

Daryl