Yesterday I took my car to get a dent fixed. It was one of those dents that, while barely visible, required a lot of time and expense to fix. (In fact, you had to kind of crouch down and look very closely at the underside of one panel to see it.) But given that it cut all the way through the paint, I couldn't ignore it!

When I collected the car in the evening, I was glad to see no evidence of the time when car met kerb a couple of weeks before.

The mechanic's quality of work was marked by the fact that there was no evidence that anything had happened at all. He told me that the most enjoyable part of his job is meeting his customers -and making sure that they are happy with his work.

We've recently been spoilt with opportunities to talk directly to our customers and partners, with two shows in quick succession: Cisco Live and Infocomm. The enthusiasm of people who attended demos, talks and presentations was palpable. It was a great opportunity to learn first-hand about the issues people are facing, and how new capabilities of our solutions are helping to address them.

The main themes customers shared with me were:

• Driving organization-wide adoption of video and moving from video meetings being a novelty, to being mainstream
• Ensuring sufficient capacity as their user numbers increase
• Reducing the cost per user for collaboration solutions
• Understanding the options for premises and cloud deployment

Within each of our demonstration areas, we showed how our video infrastructure innovations can help them address their issues.

Refreshed User Experiences

New capabilities such as multistreaming* give users the best visibility of video and shared content in a meeting. Updated controls allow users to view roster lists, mute individual participants, and select their preferred screen layouts. These capabilities come from using Cisco's latest endpoints with our industry leading video infrastructure Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms (CMR) premises solution.  People can also personalize their own meeting rooms via a browser-based portal.

New Platforms for On-Prem

Highly scalable virtualized platforms for on-premises deployments represent a dramatic increase in capacity.

• Multiparty Media 410v server supports 54 HD ports in a single 1U standard appliance.
• Multiparty Media 410v blade server supports 54 HD ports per blade; can offer 432 blades in a single UCS chassis

These options represent a dramatic capacity increase of more than 500% on virtualized platforms since we launched our first virtualized solution at Infocomm 2013.

With such scalability, you can easily add new capacity as user numbers increase. And our new blade for the MSE8000 chassis, Multiparty Media 820, offers a very high-capacity option if you need enterprise-grade scale on dedicated hardware.

And scale isn't just about platform capacity: it's also about provisioning personal CMRs for everyone.  IT managers can now easily enable tens 1000s of personal CMRs using data from their standard Active Directory database.

Simplified Licensing

With dramatically reduced and simplified licensing offers, you can provide every user with a full set of video capabilities. This includes firewall traversal and interoperability with third-party systems, using Personal Multiparty licensing. Coupled with increasing capacity on new platforms, you can greatly reduce the per-user cost for video.

Deployment Choices

With Cisco CMR, you can implement on premises, combine with a WebEx Meeting Center subscription for a hybrid premises and cloud solution, or implement as a cloud-based service.

We have just released a new video showcasing some of the new features in use, helping to get everyone to every meeting that pops into the diary!  (You may recognize some people you know)

If you would like to learn more, Andrew Reitter describes the new features in Cisco CMR premises in this short clip.  (Once again, watch for our team!)

Take a moment to tell us how you are driving video adoption in your organization.

*Multistreaming has additional infrastructure requirements; please check product technical notes