How Cisco’s Webex Plans To Beat Zoom

By Richard Miniter, Zenger News

The pandemic helped make Zoom into the world’s most used videoconferencing tool, but its market share is slipping and competitors are closing in – including Webex by Cisco.

Webex? This isn’t the product that you remember and its new features could leave Zoom in the dust.

Behind Cisco’s bold challenge lies an interesting case study in how executives can take on dominant players in a fast-growing industry.

Cisco is playing for big stakes. U.S. videoconferencing hardware and software sales are set to explode from $7.7 billion in 2020 to almost $20 billion in 2030, according to Grand View Research. While pandemic-era remote working accelerated sales and revenue, the industry stands to benefit from other secular trends including surges in tele-medicine (the FDA just extended its uses), distance learning (especially for the U.S. military), mega-church services, online corporate training, and massively open online courses (Harvard’s CS50 computer science class alone attracts more than 100,000 paying users). Plus, cost-conscious executives are pushing virtually all business communication – from team meet-ups to global sales meetings – online. Add shareholder meetings to that mix — now that the new tech can accommodate more than 100,000 people simultaneously — and videoconferencing should be a Goliath.

Or consider videoconferencing’s potential this way: all U.S. hotels earned roughly $230 billion in 2022 and all U.S. airlines earned some $270 billion that same year. What percentage of those business will be eaten up by videoconferences in the coming years?

While the industry is big and growing, the market is fragmented and prone to sudden shifts of market share. Skype drove Zoom from it’s no. 1 position in Albania in 2022, while Zoom lost its no. 1 position to Google Meet in more than two dozen countries.

New entrants appear regularly, such as Meetn, who’s secret sauce is using videoconferencing to help salespeople close deals.

And everyone, including Meetn, is aiming at Zoom. “Meetn beats Zoom, etc by offering 12 ways to help you close more sales,” said Rick Raddatz, CEO of Meetn. “Examples include one-click video sharing, one-click slide sharing and one-click promotional popups.”

Cisco sees an interesting opportunity in this hyper-competitive landscape. Since Google Meet (no. 2 in the world, according to market researchers) and Microsoft Teams (no. 3) both come bundled with popular business software, they enjoy a huge installed user base. But that means that millions of businesses are using it, rather than choosing it. What happens when employees demand something better? If Google and Microsoft fail to continuously improve their videoconferencing offerings, if they coast along on mere customer satisfaction (“well, it works”), then they are strategically vulnerable if something else delights customers (“OMG, I have to tell my friends how this software changed my life!”).

That’s essentially what happened to Skype (now down to no. 4 worldwide), which enjoyed 32% global market share in 2020. Two years later, Skype has 6% of the global market – a plunge of 81%. Zoom and Google Meet devoured Skype’s business with better, easier-to-use tech. While Skype has improved its tech, including real-time translation, others innovated faster. Also, it was bedeviled by security, privacy, and customer-service complaints.

So how could Cisco possibly dethrone Zoom and push aside Google and Microsoft, some of the best-funded players on the planet?

That problem fell to Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s Executive Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration. We recently talked – by Webex, what else? — about his strategy, execution, and plans.

Start with the fundamental question: Why does Zoom dominate global videoconferencing?

“I think they established verb status early during the pandemic,” Patel said, by delivering a higher quality product than its rivals. “We [Webex] used to be a terrible product,” he said, “and so what happened was, during the pandemic, people… just shifted over for the quality.”

So, Zoom won the pandemic videoconferencing gold rush through innovation, reliability, and use of use.

But what has Zoom done lately? “Today, what’s happened is their stuff still works. But they haven’t really done anything that is fundamentally game changingly innovative.

Cisco absorbed the pandemic’s lessons and applied them.

It began with a culture change, led by Patel. He wanted a team that was “obsessed about building a great product,” not about checking off boxes. Passion is contagious.

Changing culture means changing the ethos and the energy. Or as Patel puts it: “Fundamentally I think it’s unethical to go out and sell a product that’s mediocre.” It is also no fun to work on a mediocre product or sell it or take customer calls about it. By contrast, a great product energizes engineers, spurs more improvements, electrifies salespeople, and brightens the voices in customer support. Culture and product quality are inter-dependent and entwined.

To make the culture shift stick, he replaced or re-assigned the entire leadership team at the Webex product level, bringing in new leaders with new ideas and a new sense of urgency. Cisco acquired BabbleLabs, a software outfit with cutting-edge real-time transcription software and a band of engineers that wanted to blow up the status quo. And it invested $1 billion over the past two years in the Webex Suite, adding hundreds of new features.

How does Webex’s investment and cultural shift translate into taking on competitors?

This is where Patel returns to his focus on quality and customer experience. Let’s think about a young writer who is sitting in a café or a single mother sitting on a balcony, with her two young children on the other side of the glass sliding door. How does she take a call from her “office” and sound professional? Webex’s new tech dramatically lowers background noise while boosting the voice quality of the primary speaker. While the math behind fixing the signal-to-noise ratio is complex, the results are dramatically simple. Barking dogs, wailing children, noisy waiters, and even the guy across the conference table with the bag of chips, no longer interrupt your meeting.

What about the multi-national conference call where speakers prefer to use their native tongue? Webex automatically translates conversations in real-time. Patel demonstrated by instantly switching to Hindi, while I followed along in English-language captions. It was faster than closed captions on Netflix. When he shifted back to English, I changed my translation to French. With no lag, his je ne sais quoi came across.

Webex’s real-time transcription isn’t perfect. But its error-rate is about equal to fast-typing humans, which itself is a major advance.

As cool as these features are, they are table stakes in the cutthroat world of videoconferencing. Every major player has rolled out some version of these voice-quality enhancers, real-time transcription, and instant translation features, though none may be as technically good as what Webex now offers. At least, for now. This is a highly competitive market.

So, what does Webex have that would really threaten the dominant players?

Two things, Patel said, a better bundle and better security – two shortcomings that downsized Skype and might bring down the big guys too.

First the bundle. Think about what the customer actually needs, Patel said. You might need landline-calling capacity, for traveling colleagues far from reliable wi-fi. You probably need both synchronous and asynchronous video (that’s live and recorded video in plain English). Sometimes a real-time meeting is the fastest way to secure successful collaboration, sometimes a recorded message is a more-effective use of executive time. Other times, a customer may need a webinar or video training product. Or the customer wants to stream a real-life event. Or share slides. Or whiteboards. Or poll employees. With most competing videoconferencing products, each of these uses requires contracting with a different vendor and duct-taping the whole pipe collection together. And, then, recruiting another team to monitor the mess.

That solution is costly, complicated, and prone to springing leaks.

What if you could do all those things with one product? What if the price of the bundle was less than a competitor’s price for video calls alone? And what if it works for up to 100,000 users on a single call?

That’s the value proposition that Webex is bringing to market.

But it’s not the whole story. Here is where Cisco’s generative AI could be a game-changer. Webex will soon be able to scan meetings that executives missed and send a recorded summary to the traveling manager. That means fewer catch-up meetings or dropped balls. You can even do what Patel does with these meeting summaries and listen to them at 1.5 speed, saving even more time. This is also a good way to bridge time zones for dispersed teams.

Then, Patel puts something unexpected on the table. What if Webex used AI to raise cybersecurity to military-grade?

Here Patel’s expertise in cybersecurity gets him talking faster. The Webex transcriber must be over-heating. He’s truly excited.

Right now, he says, cybersecurity is mainly policed at human speed. With AI, security can be moved “from human scale to machine scale.” He is talking about a true step-change in security. Predicting and preventing intrusions. Using pattern-matching to detect ransomware attacks. Even flagging which employees might be vulnerable to phishing attacks. In short, using AI to move from reacting to creating.

Also, most videoconferencing security is patchwork of fixes, some written by engineers who have retired. Yet this complexity is like Death Star’s vent pipe – a way in for rogue elements to blow it up. AI could effortlessly simplify its internal contradictions, producing a safer, cheaper security system. Plus, policies could be instantly updated from a single control panel; no more late nights scrambling to comply with a new security edict from Sacramento or Brussels.

It’s an exciting vision.

Will Webex topple Zoom? Competition for the crown is fierce and some of Big Tech’s biggest minds at war with each other for it. While customers will definitely win, it is too soon to name the king of videoconferencing.

Still, Webex’s culture shift and customer-centric focus points the way for executives to disrupt their own industries.