Cisco Spark rebranded as Cisco Webex Teams

Wednesday, 16 May 2018

Cisco has announced that Cisco Spark has been rebranded as Cisco Webex Teams. Webex Teams will form a single cloud platform which will encompass the entire Cisco Collaboration Suite:

The three pillars form the entire eco-system of services made available to customers for communication and collaboration.

Cisco Webex Teams will take all of the collaboration features of Cisco Spark and offers them alongside features based on the Webex conferencing platform, such as whiteboarding, persistent messaging, simple guest access, and content sharing. This will allow a total integration of technology across platforms, complete with a common cloud and user experience.

Webex Meetings will take a "video first" approach, encouraging users to turn on their camera for each meeting. In addition, Webex Meetings will now allow up to 1,000 people to join, in addition to more storage, advanced security and analytics capabilities. The latest version of Webex Meetings will roll out to users automatically in the coming months.

The Webex rebrand applies to a bevy of existing Cisco devices and services. For instance, the Cisco Spark Board becomes the Webex Board and the Spark Assistant will now be known as Webex Assistant. Webex Assistant will gain updates that add more functionality and extend its availability to more devices. Webex Assistant will appear in all Cisco's cloud-connected Webex Room Kit and Room Series devices in the coming months.

Finally Cisco is also launching Webex Share, a hardware adapter that turns a TV screen into a Webex meeting screen. Webex Share will be available for Webex Meetings and Teams toward the end of 2018. Lastly, Cisco announced the Collaboration Flex Plan, a new subscription option that charges per active user.