Cisco Unified Workspace: Now I Know What the Heck It Is

headscratch

Ask and ye shall receive, it seems: Fast forward a month, and I’ve gotten some answers. In short, Unified Workspace is, according to the company, “an integrated and strategic approach to the enterprise workspace that is squarely focused on helping employees access all of the people and resources they need to do their jobs effectively from wherever they are, on whatever device they choose and with an enhanced quality of experience.”

Okay, marketing-speak aside, Unified Workspace is a collection of Cisco technologies and validated designs with third-party software and a management suite. It’s designed to enable IT to provide a consistent user experience no matter where they are and what device they’re using.

At its heart, it sounds somewhat similar to Enterasys’ OneFabric architecture, which unifies the management of wired and wireless networks from the data center to the edge, including bring-your-own-device (BYOD) management. But Cisco is quick to point out Unified Workspace includes validated designs to slip in third-party applications with little fuss. And the applications are a combination of device-centric and virtual accessed via the Cisco Virtualization Experience Architecture (VXI).

“If you look at it in context, a workspace is different from a workplace,” said Richard McLeod, senior director of Collaboration Sales for the Worldwide Channels at Cisco. “We’re getting to where the place we go to work isn’t the most critical definition of where we work.”

Cisco Unified Workspace also includes what Cisco terms “Smart Services” that speak to BYOD, virtualization and . According to Cisco, the Smart Services are:

McLeod noted the validated designs and preintegration feature make Unified Workspace a game-changer in the user experience management space with the channel.

“If you can get the stack integrated and tested, which then becomes a baseline, you’ve added more value,” he said.

The increasingly popular unified network/BYOD space addresses the collective headache enterprises and verticals such as health care and education are feeling. The idea is simple, but the success of these solutions lies in whether they’re also simple to execute.