Cisco Systems Inc. has a plan to become the digital assistant for the company meeting room. By connecting its hardware and software to its collaboration suite, Cisco Spark, the company aims to position itself at the center of enterprise communication.

“Spark is a digital assistant, just like Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri, but built for the enterprise with Cisco security behind it,” said Jose de Castro (pictured), chief technology officer of cognitive collaboration and Spark platform at Cisco Systems. “We think of ourselves as building the operating system for teams.”

De Castro stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Barcelona, Spain, and spoke with co-hosts John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu). They discussed key elements of Cisco’s collaboration platform and security protections that surround the architecture. (* Disclosure below.)

Acquisitions helped build the Spark platform

Cisco Spark is the outgrowth of recent acquisitions. The company bought Tropo Inc. in 2015 to extend its developer network and begin building a business around collaboration as a service. Last May, the company acquired MindMeld Inc., an artificial intelligence platform for chat and voice assistants.

Cisco’s move into the enterprise collaboration space is part of an evolution from hardware to software, with the goal of ultimately becoming a platform company. “That is the single biggest asset we have at Cisco in order to penetrate this digital assistant, voice assistant market,” de Castro said. “We already have the hardware in place. For us, it’s a software upgrade.”

Recent issues inside the cybersecurity world have focused attention on an interesting element of Cisco Spark’s platform. Publicity surrounding two massive processor security flaws — Meltdown and Spectre — have raised questions about protection of collaboration data. For any company, this information can be highly sensitive.

Spark, however, is architected with end-to-end encryption. Data is only visible in user clients, and it’s extremely difficult to hack because customers control the security keys outside the cloud. Even Cisco can’t access this data.

“Spark is one of the most secure messaging and collaboration platforms that are out there,” de Castro said. “We’ve been working with the teams to figure out how we can distribute our workloads so that we can derive insights from the data without ever seeing the data.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Cisco Live Barcelona 2018. (* Disclosure: Cisco Systems Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Cisco Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE