Cisco Live Reflections: The Power of Specialized Partnerships

Just wrapped up another successful broadcast at Cisco Live San Diego, and one conversation keeps sticking with me. I sat down with Giles Adams from VQ Communications and Helen Briggs from Cisco to discuss the evolving world of secure video conferencing.

The partnership between these two companies perfectly illustrates something we're seeing more of in enterprise tech: specialized players filling critical gaps that would be too niche for larger vendors to address directly.

The Numbers Tell the Story

What caught my attention wasn't just the technology - it was the scale. VQ and Cisco have completed over 500 joint projects in just four and a half years. That's not a casual partnership; that's solving real customer problems at volume.

The market they're addressing is fascinating: organizations that need cloud-quality video conferencing features but in completely air-gapped, on-premise environments. Think government agencies, defense contractors, and increasingly, enterprise customers dealing with highly sensitive data.

Beyond the Technology

Helen made a point that resonated: "Cloud first, not cloud only." That philosophy acknowledges what many of us are seeing - customers want the innovation and scale of cloud services, but they also need the control and security of on-premise deployments.

VQ's engineers are essentially recreating cloud-native AI features like transcription and translation for environments that never touch the internet. It's harder than it sounds, which is exactly why partnerships like this matter.

What's Next

The demand for secure, on-premise communications isn't shrinking - it's growing. As data sensitivity concerns increase and regulations tighten, we'll likely see more of these specialized partnerships emerge.

Sometimes the most interesting innovations happen in the spaces between the big platforms.