Cisco & Microsoft’s New Partnership
This week Cisco announced that in the first half of next year, you will be able to run Microsoft Teams natively as the default experience on certified Cisco Webex video endpoints, this marks a huge intermobility step between the two collaboration giants.
To understand why this is a substantial announcement. Let’s start with a question. Ever wondered why your PC slows down when you join a Microsoft Teams meeting, especially when there are a larger number of participants?
For those not familiar with video conferencing, it all comes down to something called the CODEC, an abbreviation for coder decoder. What is it, what does it do and why does it matter?
Let’s start with some basic maths. A standard high-definition picture is comprised of 2,073,600 pixels, (1920×1080), multiply that by three because each pixel uses three colours, red, green and blue (RGB), and then multiply the whole lot by 30 (30 frames per second). That’s 186,624,000 bits of information per second, or 186Mbps not including layer 2 and 3 overhead. That’s a lot of bandwidth even before we get on to 4k, and certainly more than the average remote or home worker will have available.
So, the CODEC is a software or hardware device that can compress a video stream for transmission and decompresses at the other end, and there are a number of standards such as H.264 and H.265 the latter of which is 99% efficient, but the bottom line is, this takes a lot of processing power, and your PC is doing this in software rather than hardware as Cisco solutions do.
This is why your PC slows down on a Teams video call, even when you reduce the size of the window. The more streams your PC has to decode and decompress, the worse the problem gets, further exacerbated by sharing your screen for a presentation.
This issue also applies to video solutions that use small form factor PCs as the base, and while these solutions are low cost and great for small meeting rooms, huddle and informal meeting spaces, they don’t scale well. Consideration should also be given the reliability and security issues that can dog any Windows platform.
The recent announcement of Microsoft Teams running natively on Cisco endpoints is great news for users that want to enjoy everything Microsoft Teams has to offer, but delivered on an award winning, high quality powerful video solution. Cisco by design use a hardware CODEC in their design, based on dedicated DSP (Digital Signal Processors) meaning the processor lag is not an issue.
Users can continue to get the Microsoft Teams experience while utilising Cisco’s reliable video technology, powerful camera intelligence, AI driven features and industry leading noise removal technologies that enable inclusive and feature rich collaborative meeting experiences.
This isn’t however going to be available on all devices, initially only the Webex Room Bar, Webex Board Pro, 55 and 75 inch, Webex Room Kit Pro, are expected to be certified by early 2023 but it is a massive leap forward having two industry giants working in this way.
Of course, other devices are expected to follow in due course including the Webex Desk Pro, the Webex Desk Camera and some headphones with a Teams button by early 2023.
Watch this space.
About the author
Andy Poore
Solutions Architect at Koris365
A Cisco collaboration & networking champion with over 23 years technical experience from initial client engagement, planning and design to deployment, and on-going service management and support. Andy has unparalleled practical experience and knowledge in the IP enabled collaboration sector with involvement in several hundred deployments in both the public and private sectors, from single SMB sites to large global distributed deployments.