Cisco Live 2026: Blending innovation with resilience 

Cisco Live 2026 in Las Vegas is all about building resilient, AI-ready organizations. This marriage of assurance and innovation sits at the heart of what we do at VQ Communications, bringing modern, cloud-like capabilities to self-hosted and air-gapped conferencing. 

Ahead of the event, we wanted to share some of the business challenges we’re currently helping customers solve. If any of these resonates with you, come see us at Cisco Live on stand 3222 in the World of Solutions, or get ahead now by booking a meeting with us at the show – spaces are limited so reserve your slot today to avoid missing out! 

Are you looking to deliver… 

• Robust incident management with high-availability? 

• TMS replacement – endorsed by Cisco? 

• AI in self-hosted conferencing? 

• Microsoft Teams Rooms on Cisco devices, including in GCC, GCC High and DoD environments?  

• Enhanced conferencing observability? 

• An exit from VMware? 

If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these, we should talk – book your Cisco Live! meeting now, or read on to discover how we can help you solve these challenges. 

Robust incident management with high-availability 

Few scenarios demand greater resilience than incident-management. Whether you’re dealing with a threat to national security, natural disaster, or business continuity interruption, you need absolute assurance that your key people can coordinate your response reliably. 

A basic managed meeting isn’t enough. Incident responses have special requirements, such as blast dial, breakout spaces, security classifications, and advanced management tools to support operations teams. 

It’s to meet these types of requirements that we built VQ Conference Manager’s Advanced Conferencing Center – and you can see it in action on our stand at Cisco Live!  

Advanced Conferencing Center is just one of the ways VQ Conference Manager supports robust incident management. New-and-improved high-availability for the wider VQ Conference Manager platform – with sub-60-second failover times – and multi-CMS-cluster support, further enhance the overall resilience of your conferencing service. 

Cisco TMS replacement – endorsed by Cisco 

The end-of-support date for Cisco TelePresence Management Suite (TMS) looms ever closer. January 2027 is just months away. Have you got a replacement lined up for your scheduling, OBTP, Outlook integration, and device-management? 

If you’re using TMS to underpin important conferencing, then total confidence in the software you replace it with is essential. 

If you haven’t got a TMS replacement pathway in place, or have any doubts about the software you’ve chosen, speak to us to understand your options.  

Book a meeting with VQ Communications at Cisco Live! to see the only complete, on-prem TMS successor recommended by Cisco. Many customers tell us this Cisco endorsement is the deal-clincher, thanks to the priceless peace of mind it gives them. 

AI in self-hosted and air-gapped conferencing 

AI and agents have become part of everyday life, from auto-generated captions and summaries to natural-language interactions with websites and other IT systems through chatbots. 

However, with the models underpinning these capabilities typically residing in the cloud, they’ve tended to be off the table for high-security collaboration environments.  

We’re working to bring these types of cloud-like capability to VQ Conference Manager, and fully supporting Cisco’s Collaboration AI PODs. This will give anyone running self-hosted or air-gapped platforms the best of both worlds: The non-negotiable resilience and security that mission-critical conferencing demands, coupled with modern innovation to enhance user experiences and operational efficiency. Book one of our meeting slots to chat about our AI roadmap.  

Running Cisco in-room devices in Microsoft Teams environments 

Parts of the public sector, including the United States armed forces, have chosen Microsoft Teams for unclassified collaboration, using Microsoft 365 GCC, GCC High, or DoD. 

Microsoft has just announced support for running Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR) on Cisco devices in DoD cloud environments. This means defense organizations using (or transitioning to) Microsoft Teams can blend the premium conferencing experience of their existing Cisco devices with the familiar Teams interface for users. VQ Conference Manager is set to play a central role here.  

This is because the Microsoft Teams Rooms Pro Management Portal is designed to support the MTR feature set, rather than the underlying devices, since these aren’t made by Microsoft. Device-management capability is provided by the equipment vendor. In the case of Cisco devices, that’s usually Webex Control Hub. However, this isn’t authorized in IL5 environments. 

Where Control Hub can’t be used, VQ Conference Manager offers a proven alternative to activate, onboard, monitor and manage MTR health and all of RoomOS without the cloud. The software is listed on the DoDIN Approved Products List (APL). 

Observability – a broader look at your conferencing 

Running a secure, dependable collaboration service requires you to know what’s happening across its many components. Customers love our Analytics, using it for tasks such as real-time troubleshooting, ROI reporting, and capacity-planning.  

We’re now taking conferencing analytics to the next level, with our forthcoming Observability. Expect new data sources that will give the teams responsible for your service greater depth and breadth of insight, starting with CUCM and Expressway Call Detail Record (CDR) and Call Media Record (CMR) data analysis and visualization. This will support faster issue triage, and more strategic growth-planning. 

Supporting your VMware exit 

Lastly, if you’re migrating away from VMware, we’ve got you covered. Come and talk to us about running VQ Conference Manager on Nutanix or Cisco NFVIS-for-UC.  

See you at the show! 

If you’re in the business of delivering mission-critical conferencing, discover these and other innovations happening in this space at the VQ Communications stand in the Cisco Live World of Solutions. 

We look forward to seeing you there – and if there’s something specific you want to discuss, why not book one of our event meeting slots today?