Cisco Webex sees 3x growth in April

Due to the unprecedented shift to remote work, leading enterprise video conferencing solution Cisco Webex supported half a billion meeting participants who generated 25 billion meeting minutes in the month of April.

The Cisco Webex platform has seen unprecedented demand and more than triples its normal volume in the social distancing times.

"We're now making it easier for you to collaborate in meetings with Webex Assistant, our voice assistant technology. Today, we are making Webex Assistant available to all Webex customers for a free trial," said Javed Khan, Vice President and General Manager of Cisco's Cloud Calling Group.

"What's even more exciting is that you can combine the Webex Assistant and the Webex enterprise free trials for a full Webex experience," Khan announced at the virtual 'Cisco Live' conference late Tuesday.

Cisco unveiled key Webex enhancements to help, including: industry-leading security and compliance capabilities, intelligent and actionable insights to deliver consistent user experiences, and an integration with Box.

"Even before the pandemic, Cisco was one of the world's largest collaboration providers, supporting nearly half the world's video conferencing. Now we're supporting 3X the normal volumes." said Khan.

Building upon the security capabilities designed into the Webex platform, the company has extended data loss prevention (DLP) retention, Legal Hold and eDiscovery to Webex Meetings.

This gives an unprecedented level of security and protection for all meeting content – recordings, transcriptions, action items and highlights.

"This is yet another industry-first security offering for Webex Meetings. We are also expanding our end-to-end encryption options to include AES 256 Bit encryption with GCM mode, providing increased protection for meeting data and resistance against tampering," informed Cisco.

The Webex users can instantly deploy Webex Assistant to conference room devices.

"Control Hub makes this a simple task even if you have tens of thousands of devices. This will minimize the number of times people touch the screen or touchpad in shared spaces," said the company.

"Additionally, to help move work forward from wherever you are, we've now integrated Webex Teams and Box, the leading cloud content management platform that is used by 68 per cent of the Fortune 500 and nearly 100,000 businesses globally," Cisco added.

According to the company, the new integration with online medical record service Epic would enable providers to use Webex Teams to conduct a video visit with a patient, review medical history and update clinical documentation. More than 250 million patients have a current electronic record in Epic (Electronic Portfolio of International Credentials).

Patients don't need to download anything -- they simply login to the highly secure session over a web browser and get the care they need.