The way that people meet and collaborate changes constantly. Remote meetings are becoming ever more important. On January 24th, we announced our latest collaboration solutions, including the Cisco Spark Board. We're ever-focused on solutions that change the game. We want to help you drive productivity, help teams be more effective, and enhance the value of meetings.

Attendees at the launch event queued to try the capabilities of the Cisco Spark Board. We received fantastic feedback. In particular, many highlighted the ability to capture and share ideas amongst a group using Cisco Spark.

Simplifying the Buying Experience
One very important aspect of a successful product is making it easy to buy.

IT managers need the ability to buy devices and enable their user communities with all the entitlements to use them easily and quickly. Technology deployment has undergone massive shifts from heavy premises-based investments to cloud. But you need the flexibility to choose the right path foryourbusiness. And you need simple and predictable pricing, as John Brigden describes in a recent blog post.

Tying Together Deployment Models
Cisco Spark Flex Plan is a first-of-its-kind purchasing model. It offers both premises and cloud-based meeting, messaging, and call capabilities in a single subscription that includes technical support services.

The fact that the plan brings together cloud and on- premises simplifies transitioning users to cloud. You no longer need to time transitions to cloud services based on budget timetables. Users don't need new licenses as they move to cloud. One subscription covers either deployment option. Specifically, it covers software, licensing, and technical support for Cisco Spark and Cisco WebEx, as well as Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Meeting Server services. Within that, there are two options:

• Cisco Spark Flex Plan: Employee Count is a companywide subscription that provides a perfect way to enable every knowledge worker with message, meeting, and calling capabilities while including cloud and premises deployment options.
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• Cisco Spark Flex Plan: Shared Meetings,a new option, helps users to start with video meetings. It offers a first step to the Employee Count option. It's a pay-as-you-grow offer that adds the rich experience of Cisco Spark Advanced Meetings to conference room devices, including Cisco Spark Board.

Either option lets you choose from Cisco Spark cloud or on-premises services or a mix of the two.

Our goal is not only to develop solutions that help your business but make it easy for you to buy and implement those solutions -the way you need to do it.

For more information, check out the Cisco Spark Flex Plan pages on Cisco.com.