Cisco rebrands Spark as WebEx to simplify partners’ go to market

Cisco is saying goodbye to Spark branding and incorporating the offering under its WebEx platform as partners are struggling to differentiate between the two offerings. Nirav Sheth, VP of architectures, solutions and engineering for Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, explained that this was a response to partner concerns over how to differentiate between the two products.

Cisco Spark will now be known as WebEx Teams as Cisco is saying goodbye to Spark Meetings in favour of WebEx meetings only.

According to Sheth, WebEx has become the most trusted brand in the industry for meetings and collaboration, with three billion meeting minutes a month and nearly 40 billion meeting minutes annually, along with 80 percent brand name recognition by knowledge workers around the world.

“Prior to this convergence, we had Cisco Spark with its own type of meeting – the Spark meeting, but we still had WebEx with its own WebEx meetings. Users could join Cisco Spark meetings only from the Cisco Spark app and WebEx meetings from the WebEx app,” Jonathan Rosenberg, Cisco fellow, VP and CTO for Cisco’s collaboration business, explained in a blog post this week.

“Users could join WebEx meetings from Cisco Spark if they were clever, but they did not get any of the critical meetings features. With this convergence – it’s all simplified,” he added.

Cisco also introduced a new WebEx Meetings application, WebEx Assistant and a WebEx Share hardware device, Rosenberg noted.