IBM and Cisco will make Watson into a virtual workmate

Watson might schedule your meetings someday if a partnership between IBM and Cisco Systems bears the fruit they’re hoping for.

In the meantime, the companies hope to save employees from some of the meaningless tasks they have to carry out just to work with their colleagues.

IBM’s Verse email platform and Connections collaboration suite are a good match for Cisco products like the Spark messaging app and WebEx conferencing service, so the two vendors have found ways to integrate them, company officials say. All this will happen in the cloud. They’ll demonstrate the first examples next month at the Cisco Live conference.

The collaboration could have particular value for enterprise Apple users. Both IBM and Cisco have partnerships with Apple for enterprise applications and communications on the company's devices. Details on that aspect of the IBM-Cisco partnership will come later, they said.

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