Cisco, the networking giant, has launched Project Squared, a business collaboration app that combines chat, audio, video, multi-party meetings, and content sharing in a single experience.

Project Squared, unveiled at the Collaboration Summit 2014, is built upon the Cisco Collaboration Cloud, a new generation platform and is the company’s answer to the challenges an organisation faces of staying connected across devices, time zones and project teams.

The app makes virtual conferencing possible. Teams can download the app (which is free for now), start a room and invite others inside or outside the organisation to join by simply entering their e-mail address. Once in the room teams can securely share messages, and start voice and video calls, with no download requirement.

The company doesn’t intend to market it as a consumer app — it doesn't, want to be the next mobile messaging app similar to WhatsApp or become a Facebook for corporates. It plans to pitch its app to corporates in order to help them improve employees’ productivity and collaborate with customers, business partners and workers. Now, if a company’s data is on the cloud, the question that rises is — how reliable is the platform.

Operating on Cisco’s cloud platform, the app provides end-to-end content encryption, offering reliable data transfer by keeping away hackers. The data get encrypted at the client’s side and thus promises privacy of documents.

Rowan Trollope, SVP, Collaboration Technology Group, Cisco, said, “we created Project Squared and the Cisco collaboration cloud platform to deliver on our dream to transform the collaboration experience, making it easy to stay constantly connected to the people, projects and ideas that matter most.”

(The writer is in Los Angels at the invitation of Cisco)

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