Optimizing IT and Employee Experiences with Cisco’s Snorre Kjesbu

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone, welcome back here to techron tv. I'm really happy to have our next guest on here.

It's the first time he's been on. I hope it won't be the last time I'd like to welcome. And if I mispronounce, I apologize.

Nora Casbu, close senior VP and general manager for WebEx devices over at Cisco. Nora is, how bad was that? No, I think you did a good job, Alan.

And, and, uh, you know, uh, with a name like that, as long as it closely resembles my name, I'm, I'm perfectly fine. And, um, I actually head up, uh, employee experiences at Cisco now with, uh, both the WebEx suite with calling and meetings and the rest of the Suite plus devices. So we have lots of talk Today.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And, um, thank you for being so gracious about me, mangling your name.

I'm sure I'm not the first or the last person, but, uh, for those at home who might be wondering, SNOD's name is of Norwegian descent, and it's a very, we're not gonna go into it here, but it's a, a name with Rich, rich in history and tradition, and I'll leave it at that. Um, so snore. Everyone out here has used WebEx, I think, right?

Other people have used some of the other solutions out in the market. Other people say, I don't really care what I use as long as it works, and that that's okay. When we think about WebEx though, and WebEx devices, it, it's more than, you know, the mission may have started out as just doing simple video conferencing, but it's grown into something much more rich or much more expansive, much more useful.

Why don't we, if you don't mind, and I don't wanna put you on the spot, but I am, tell us what, you know, talk to us about the mission now. So I think the mission, if you think about it, is that when we look at any collaboration tool, whether that's from Cisco or from any of our competitors, the whole purpose of that, I would say are two things. First of all, communication today, using video, using, uh, chat, uh, having devices, et cetera, is mission critical for the companies out there.

So I think that's number one. And that has dramatically changed over the last few years. So, uh, it has to be reliable.

It has to provide the things you need when you need it. The second thing is the technology should never get in the way of what's happening in the meeting. I tell my team when we are developing these products, that we should make a product that people find easy to use that doesn't get in the way of what they're doing.

And that should be the best supporting actor if we're talking an Oscar term of actually the real meeting. So we should never get technology in the way of, but it should do what you expect it to do, uh, uh, when you need the different type of functions. And I think that creating a great product, creating a great user experience is key to be able to create that.

Yeah. And, and you know, if I, I'm far from an expert on, on in this matter, in this subject, but, but creating that experience is I think kinda what separates, excuse my sexist, but what separates the men from the boys, if you will, in, in this whole area, right? I think kind of doing basic video conferencing is almost table stakes these days, but creating a rich user experience, create, adding all of the, the, the surrounding richness, if you will, is, is what distinguishes, you know, premium from, from others.

Yeah. And, and I think there are, there are two facets to that, if I may. Um, one is actually the people that are using the service, uh, uh, in a meeting, in a conversation, uh, that are using the equipment and everything that actually gets stuff done.

But then you also have the people in the organization that own and operates. That is the IT organization. That's the facilities organization that it's actually running this service.

And as I said in the beginning, with this now being mission critical, you need to make sure that they have all the right tools as well. And I think where Cisco has a strong offer is that we have both the meeting and the calling and the contact center backend. We have, uh, application that runs on your phone, on your, uh, laptop.

We have the hardware devices as the front end. We have a fabric of AI that actually goes across all of these, both, uh, uh, both all the way out at the edge and in the back. But then what's interesting with Cisco is that because of our networking and security, uh, business, we also have the manageability and the observability that will actually allow you to run this and, uh, and operate this at scale, uh, as well.

And I think that bringing all of these things together and think about that holistically, uh, is, is absolutely, uh, absolutely, uh, key to us. And we call that full stack collaboration because it basically builds, uh, on, on everything. Absolutely.

One thing you left added there that Cisco brings to this security, Uh, absolutely security and security is woven. And thank you for reminding me. And, uh, uh, you know, this is my elevator pitch when I, whenever I asked why Cisco.

Mm-hmm. This is, is really the elevator pitch. And, and if I can go into some, some really deep details, uh, on the networking side, we have a tool called Thousand Ice, uh, which basically means that you can do full, uh, uh, overview of your network or all the way from the cloud, all the way out, uh, uh, into the network.

And we even have implemented a thousand eyes agents on our devices, which means that, uh, that we take things from the networking business, we introduce that into CoLab, which means that you have a whole different suite of tools as well, uh, that that can actually be used for people that own and operate the service. Uh, and, and, uh, I think that those tools are also super powerful. Agreed.

Agreed. They are Umno. If it's okay, I wanna jump in.

We, we've kind of been skirting the edges of it, but let's dive into optimizing IT and employee experiences using things like scalable video collaboration, streamlined workspace design. When, when we talk about that, dive in for us here, if you can. Yeah.

So when it comes to, to scalable, um, I think scalable comes one for the number of participants you can bring into meetings. And, and if you can do large scale meetings today, we can cover meetings up to a hundred thousand people. So that's one part of scale.

The other part of scale that's really key to us is the ability to scale your deployment. Um, we had a, uh, an organization that during covid went from two meeting rooms to 600 without adding people to their IT org because it's scaled, uh, because of the tools that are available and because the way we also use those tools in, in, in, in the manageability and observability of the service. So I think that scale comes from, from both ends, um, so that you can actually, uh, increase your footprint and you can do this without, uh, uh, without adding people.

I think that is also really key about, uh, about scale. Absolutely. You know, you mentioned AI before, usually the, you know, we have the par the balloons go off when someone mentions ai, right?

How long can you go without mentioning ai? What role is AI playing in that though, in delivering that sort of scalability without adding, you know, additional IT resources which are at a premium today? Yeah, so with ai, I think the way we've been thinking about ai, uh, at Cisco is really along three axis.

Uh, we started incredibly early with a partnership with Nvidia back in 2015. That's 10 years ago. Uh, so all of our Cisco devices have actually been running an NVIDIA platform for a decade.

Uh, through that we developed a whole, uh, uh, library of algorithms out at the edge that we've been using, uh, all along. So that's, that's something where we've just put stone on top of stone on cover of stone that has been helpful for, uh, better video, for noise canceling, et cetera. And we, we do that and we, we call a lot of what we do, uh, there, RMM or real-time media models where we are actually using ai, uh, on audio and video and, and, and using that.

Then we use large language models, uh, to transcribe meetings, to, uh, take actions to do all the things that, that you expect from AI in, in 2025. And this is core to any type of meeting and to be able to, uh, to actually use that and use those rich tools. The third thing, which I think is pretty unique for Cisco, is that we also use AI on the manageability side.

So we have a tool called Control Hub, where you gather all of the information from your, uh, from your estate. And let's say you have, uh, a problem in a room where, um, uh, where, uh, something is going wrong or you have a problem in a network where, where there are challenges, then we have the ability to actually use AI to prioritize, to, uh, propose ways of solving that. They would actually go through a lot of different tools to be able to gather that information as well and say, you know what, the first thing you should do is to fix this problem because that has the highest impact, that has the most amount of users or the highest seniority of meetings, et cetera, et cetera.

And so for us, AI goes really across all of those three. And also with the acquisition we made of a company called Baby Labs, uh, some years back, we have some advanced AI technologies when it comes to optimizing for voice, take out, uh, uh, any type of disturbances as well in, in the meetings. Excellent.

Sonora, I'm gonna ask you to put on some crystal glasses here, if you will. All of this we've been talking about is great. We've come a long way from just the basic conference call, video call, but the promise is to deliver so much more here, more immersive, more, more useful, I guess is the best word I could think of, more valuable If I, if I asked you to, you know, look in your crystal ball and say, Hey, what, what can we deliver that would make this even more valuable?

Where do you, you know, where do you think, and not, maybe not just Cisco, but the industry in general, where are we going here that can make this happen? Yeah. So, uh, and I think this is valid actually for, for the entire industry.

Uh, so we were working a lot on what is going to be our vision, uh, going forward. And uh, it took us a long time to land on two simple words, and that is what we call distance zero. And what we mean by distance zero is that regardless of where you are attending from, regardless of the shape of your meeting, it should feel like you're in the action.

Uh, I think that if you look at what we did on the Covid with all of us had one square each, uh, I think we had a good experience for certain type of meetings, but when you have people back in the office, you have people calling in from a remote, and then all of a sudden you're going to discuss an object. How do you make sure that there is zero distance for everyone in that meeting when that object is being discussed? And what we are striving for is to make sure we tear down the barriers between people that are together and people that are remote.

And that we're also trying to not only make that about the human and the human interaction, but also when you start discussing objects. That is why the collaboration that we have with Apple, uh, around stereoscopic video, uh, there were that you can basically, now when you use WebEx meetings and WebEx devices, you get 3D stereoscopic video used using Apple Vision Pros. We have brought down the distance as well when you start, uh, when you start, uh, discussing objects and you start discussing, uh, both concepts and objects together, et cetera.

So I think that if you ask me to look into the crystal ball, I think what we are going to strive for, um, is to really try to drive distance zero across all of the meeting types and all of the type of work that you will do in an organization. And I think we've just scratched the surface there, and I think a lot of things are going to happen in that space. I don't disagree.

So we're about outta time, but for people who want to get more information, who wanna plug into what, you know, WebEx is cooking, what, what's the be what's the best place to send them out? com web, but give us what do you where, give us the on-ramp. Uh, so, uh, the, the on-ramp I would say are a couple things.

I mean, first of all, the obvious ones that you just mentioned go to our, uh, go to our landing pages and, and, and things like that. But what we have done is that we have created a tool that you could just download and use. And in that tool, uh, you can actually just specify the sizes of your room and, uh, the number of people you would like in that room.

And then the tool will actually propose for you the type of equipment you should have there, the number of microphones, uh, if there are dead zones in the room, or maybe even if you're over specified it, maybe you should take some equipment out or may maybe you could have a smaller screen. And I think that using that tool, uh, is something that will really, uh, get you starting. And I think that that would be a great, uh, starting point and we'll, we'll send a link over.

Absolutely. We'll have it there. Snore.

Thank you so much for coming here on Text Trunk tv. We appreciate you, uh, coming on here. Um, you know what, for people, look, everyone's going to conferences again, right?

It's no more just virtual, which, you know, wasn't bad with WebEx, all this virtual stuff. It was good for it. But where, where, you know, anywhere in the world that you can think of, you guys are gonna be at that maybe some folks in our audience might be able to get some hands on.

No, absolutely. And uh, you know, we have Enterprise Connect coming up, uh, this month actually. Uh, we'll have a big presence there.

Uh, you know, we have, uh, ISE that was just done in Europe. We have Infocom coming up, uh, now and, and in the summer. And then we have WebEx one coming in the fall, and then we have three Cisco lives during the year.

So there are a lot of possible interactions when you go there. You could touch it, you could feel it, you could talk to the people that actually develop the, or that's who we are. You'll be hands-on, meet people that can go deep with you.

You could come and listen to our, our, our presentations where we try to take a broad, uh, approach looking into what's happening in the industry. And it would be lovely to, uh, see, uh, uh, your audience there and, uh, it would be great to meet with. Fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you. Snore.

Thank you for coming on today. Um, senior vp, well actually that title's a little out of date. What, what is the right title now?

You know, I'm, I'm more focused on what I do, which is I jump outta bed every single morning to make distance zero happening. Uh, but I'm the senior Vice president and general manager for employee experiences, which is basically WebEx, suite plus, uh, devices. And thank you for having me.

It was an honor. My pleasure. It was my honor to have you.

Good luck. Keep up the great work. Can't wait to see what else comes down out of this.

It's an exciting time, certainly in the industry. We're gonna take a break here on Tech Drunk tv. We'll be back in a moment.

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