WebexOne 2025: Six exciting new capabilities in VQ Conference Manager

One of the cornerstones of VQ Communications is continual innovation, as technology leaps forward and customer demands evolve.

Our 40+ person product team enables us to deliver on our roadmap at pace and support large-scale deployments for enterprise-class customers. Over recent months, we’ve been hard at work on a range of new features. On the eve of WebexOne 2025, we’re really excited to share six of these forthcoming enhancements with you, along with an exciting company expansion announcement.

Product developments include unified meeting scheduling, user experience and accessibility enhancements, expanded analytics, and of course, artificial intelligence (AI).

So, in line with the WebexOne 2025 ‘Get in on AI’ theme, let’s start with how we’re securely building machine learning (ML) and generative AI (genAI) into VQ Conference Manager.

1. Enterprise-grade AI for self-hosted environments

Anyone using a cloud-based conferencing service will likely have discovered the time-savings that AI-generated meeting transcriptions and summaries can unlock. No more scribbling notes or going back over recordings to ensure you’ve captured all the decisions and actions.

For many of our customers, however, cloud-based AI isn’t an option. That’s why we’ve created an alternative.

VQ Conference Manager will soon offer AI-powered meeting transcription and intelligent summaries for fully self-hosted and air-gapped conferencing services. This will use a self-contained AI engine with zero cloud connectivity required, bringing the benefits of genAI and ML to customers whose data must remain entirely within their own environment.

And this is only the start. We’ll be working on further AI integration for self-hosted conferencing, aligned with Cisco’s plans, over the coming months.

2. Unified meeting scheduling across CMS, Webex, and more

Many organizations run hybrid conferencing systems, with Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) alongside platforms such as Webex or Microsoft Teams. To make scheduling and joining meetings easy for end users in these environments, we’re bringing in tools that provide a unified experience across your platforms.

Schedule meetings on either Webex or CMS, with further intelligence in the pipeline to automatically determine where a particular meeting should be hosted. Pull Microsoft Teams meetings out of your Microsoft 365 platform, and display one-tap Join buttons on your in-room Cisco video devices, in the same way you do with Webex and CMS meetings.

This all combines to make scheduling and joining meetings a breeze for users, whichever platform they’re hosted on.

3. Microsoft Teams Rooms on Cisco video devices

On the subject of Microsoft Teams and unified experiences, we’re also announcing support for Cisco video devices running Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), via our Device Management and Automation (DMA) product. This will enable unified device management for administrators overseeing mixed collaboration systems.

It will also allow organizations to run Microsoft Teams Rooms on Cisco devices in self-hosted or sovereign environments where Webex Control Hub can’t be used.

4. Fresh user interface, built for performance and accessibility

We’re hard at work re-engineering the front-end of our Meeting Services product, which is the tooling used by call operators to manage conferences. This includes a full upgrade of the behind-the-scenes technology to improve performance and accessibility.We’ll also be redesigning the user interface, to bring it in line with the modern user experience (UX) customers already enjoy in our DMA product

This technology update will enable further UX improvements in Meeting Services over the coming months. And this brings us nicely to our next announcement…

5. Advanced Conferencing Center, for crisis-management and more

During an emergency, when every second matters, you need the right decision-makers together in the right places, at the right times. This can involve lots of participants, who need to be moved between meetings at pace, often on a tight schedule, to ensure timely and informed choices are made.

To support these highly complex meetings, we’ve been working with a leading US academic research institution to build our brand-new Advanced Conferencing Center. This is designed specifically for high-pressure, high-security environments, to support sophisticated, multi-stage calls that need to work perfectly, every time.

As well as crisis-management, Advanced Conferencing Center is ideal for complex enterprise calls, such as large-scale conferences or all-company workshops, where you have significant numbers of participants, and a variety of meeting and breakout rooms for different sessions.

6. Extended observability, for a unified experience

As part of our journey to provide all the insights administrators need to run enterprise conferencing services in one place, we’re expanding our Analytics product.

Alongside data from Cisco Meeting Server, Cisco video devices, and VQ Conference Manager, administrators will now be able to visualize and explore data from Cisco Expressway and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM).

This will offer vastly enhanced observability, enabling faster fault identification and triage, and more strategic service growth planning.

7. United States expansion strengthens VQ Communications’ Americas presence

Lastly, an exciting company announcement. Having built a strong customer base in the North American market, particularly with the government, defense, and intelligence community, we’re delighted to open our first US office. Located in Virginia, this will strengthen our presence in the region and enable us to better support our growing US team and customers.

See you at WebexOne?

If you’re reading this before WebexOne 2025 and are heading to the conference, then do come and say hello to the VQ Communications team on stand B3, to find out more about these announcements.

Can’t make WebexOne 2025?

Not going to be at WebexOne 2025? No problem! Drop our Sales team a line via sales@vqcomms.com and we’ll arrange a time to talk.