If you’re like most everyone in the world, you’re doing many more collaboration meetings than you used to.
Cisco Webex is an industry-leading solution that offers rich functionality and robust performance. Yet, like all cloud-based services, the unpredictability of Internet connectivity poses a challenge to delivering consistent, positive user experiences. Fortunately, Webex offers a direct peering solution for this problem, and thanks to a partnership between Cisco Webex and PacketFabric, accessing that solution is far easier than ever before.
Cisco’s Industry-Leading Collaboration Suite
Cisco’s collaboration customers and meeting participants have long enjoyed Webex’s high-quality video conferencing and meeting experiences. Webex meetings offer a rich set of features, including innovative endpoints (Boards!); Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) integration; PSTN callback; Jabber integration; Expressway support for on-premises to Internet calls across firewalls; VoIP noise cancellation; intelligent transcriptions; and close captioning. Together, all this functionality adds up to an industry-leading user experience.
Webex has also lifted its programmatic game, with APIs and SDKs that enable valuable integrations with vertical workflows like electronic medical records (e.g., Telehealth Connector for Epic) and Pega business workflow orchestration.
Backing up all the more visible capabilities are less flashy things that still matter to enterprises: Common Identity, Webex Control Hub, Security, Compliance, and Support.
Webex Backbone: the Wizard Behind the Curtain
Even less visible but certainly no less important is the Webex backbone. This hidden gem is a highly-engineered network explicitly designed for optimally routing video and audio traffic with low latency, high quality, reliability, and security.
A Small Problem: The Public Internet
Here’s the problem: in most cases, the public internet lies between your users and the high-quality backbone that hosts your Webex site. So what happens when you couple a scrupulously engineered backbone with the unpredictability of the public internet? If you’re in this situation, you know exactly what I mean. If not, you should be happy that you’ll never have to find out!
Cisco Webex Edge Audio and Webex Edge Video Mesh solutions have been available for some time. They keep local calling and meetings within your on-premises network for better quality and lower bandwidth costs. Much of the uptake for these has been with large enterprises that maintain massive private campus networks. All good, but not all companies can afford to host their own edge mesh for better meetings.
Solution: Cisco Webex Edge Connect
Now, Cisco is changing the game for the rest of us. With the launch of Edge Connect, they’ve re-architected the Webex edge to allow you to set up QoS-enabled private access from your location, over the PacketFabric network, to the Webex backbone. That means you’ll get the same insulation from the unpredictable Internet as the largest enterprises, and you’ll see the same benefits– better security, less congestion, lower packet loss, lower jitter, and less delay in your communications. That means better calls – and lower costs!
PacketFabric & Edge Connect: Way Easier
PacketFabric and Cisco have partnered to bring you Webex Edge Connect via PacketFabric’s cloud-scale, secure, on-demand network. This partnership is the first-ever dedicated and private connection to the Cisco Webex Cloud from a Network as a Service (NaaS) platform.
Why is this exciting? Because it means you can now get the Webex backbone benefits end-to-end without the hassle, provisioning, and pricing management issues associated with setting up your own peering link connectivity via traditional telco services. Just connect in minutes to our network from hundreds of global data centers across dozens of data center operators, and we’ll link you directly to the Webex Edge.
PacketFabric offers Enterprises an easy path to Webex Edge Connect from hundreds of global locations
Harness the Power of a Cloud-Scale Network
PacketFabric isn’t a software overlay. We run our own highly-engineered private network with multi-100G bandwidth per location, with dual stacks and redundant paths. But we make it dead simple to connect via powerful automation, an easy-to-use portal, and full-featured API. We make it friendly to consume, with month-to-month up to multi-year contracts. And we let you access hundreds of data centers, public cloud provider on-ramps, Internet Exchange (IX) carriers, and XaaS solutions from a single port, including Webex Edge Connect. Once you’ve configured a port, you can add virtual circuits on-demand and allocate bandwidth across connections via the portal or programmatically. Turn on point-to-point Ethernet connections, and access any number of cloud and XaaS on-ramps. You can also set up multi-cloud BGP peerings in a snap using our Cloud Router, with no port configuration or any physical infrastructure needed.
The PacketFabric platform delivers connectivity with the characteristics you expect from the cloud: elasticity, scalability, flexibility, performance, and programmability; and all the capabilities you expect from private telco links: security, privacy, predictability, and a robust SLA.
Optimize Your Meeting Experience
Linking to Webex Edge through PacketFabric’s global private network expands your collaboration network’s reach to sites all over the world and delivers superior meeting experiences.
And if your business partners also connect to PacketFabric, you’ll see performance and quality benefits in your cross-company collaboration without the overhead of directly connecting your networks.
Learn More
If you want to learn more about Network as a Service, check out our CEO Dave Ward’s blog post. If you’d like to find out more about PacketFabric’s automated, cloud-scale connectivity, visit our platform page. If you’re looking for a better way to build access to your service edge, and benefit from the greater reach and reliable performance of our private network fabric, check out our partners page.
And don’t forget to join the Cisco Live Webex Edge session: Delivering Transformation to the Modern Edge!