Cisco Collaboration Summit: Interview with CTEO Susie WeeCisco Collaboration Summit: Interview with CTEO Susie Wee

She discusses the task of unifying Cisco's collaboration architecture as well as a presence-related project called Casual Connect.

I was first introduced to Susie Wee in September of 2011, when she was as a guest speaker on Cisco's quarterly Customer Collaboration Analyst Update call. She'd been on the job for 5 months.

Her first task was to explain her title: Chief Technology and Experience Officer. The person she replaced had held the title of CTO, but then SVP for Collaboration Barry O'Sullivan recruited Ms. Wee with the promise of a broader role. A key responsibility would be to bring a common look and feel to the many clients across the many collaboration assets, some internally developed, and others acquired: Cisco Unified Communications Manager, WebEx, Jabber and the Tandberg portfolio. Over time, that has extended to mean creating a common experience across both hosted and premises-based solutions.

While the work on rationalizing the user experience for Cisco's collaboration portfolio has been the area most closely associated with Ms. Wee's work, she has also been working on a broader rationalization of the call control assets from the various Cisco-built and acquired assets, primarily Cisco UCM and Tandberg VCS. Bringing together the underlying architectures has been an important enabler of allowing a more consistent user experience.

In addition to these roles, Ms. Wee also manages an innovation team, and some of their handiwork was on display in OJ Winge's keynote address here at the Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles. The ability to set presence based on closing an office door or placing a smartphone face down on the desk are part of a project internally known as Casual Connect.

In the video below, Ms. Wee talks about both the task of unifying Cisco's collaboration architecture as well as Casual Connect.