Orange Business Services is touting its unified communications (UC) success, having registered more than 200,000 user subscriptions for Cisco Spark and hundreds of Spark Boards for more than 20 multinational enterprise customers. It’s also kicked off an initiative to develop custom solutions around the platform via Orange Open Labs.
Cisco Spark by Orange provides team messaging, voice and video calling, online meetings, white board capabilities and a set of application programming interfaces (API) for workflow optimization across multiple enterprise applications.
“Customers are asking for single-vendor collaboration solutions that help them improve productivity and outpace the competition, and that’s what we are delivering with Cisco Spark by Orange. With this solution our co-innovation capability is well supported by our Open Lab initiative,” said André Smit, vice president Global Collaboration Sales at Cisco.
The Cisco Spark by Orange Open Labs is a network of labs that provides a global mix of physical and virtual resources, which is designed to provide a dedicated space for innovation and development.
At the labs, customers can integrate collaboration, connectivity, bot development and application integrations with the Cisco Spark API catalog. The labs provide a live software and API development environment between Cisco Spark and third-party applications. Enterprises will be able to develop specific apps leveraging Cisco Spark by Orange APIs and integrate them smoothly into their business processes, maximizing efficiency and resources.
A use case example could include creating a bot for bank customers, enabling them to pick up personal finance documents in a secure Spark space or creating a Spark space for specific customers where diverse teams from sales to marketing and customer service can access documents, chat or video conference with experts.
“Through the new Cisco Spark features, we are convinced that we can now offer a fully collaborative suite which fulfills all the digital transformation workspace promises,” said Vannina Kellershohn, vice president Universal & Unified Communications Business Unit at Orange Business Services. “The proof is in the fact that our multinational customers are already jumping on board. As even further validation, Orange Business Services was recently positioned as a leader in Gartner’s latest global Magic Quadrant for UCaaS.”
