“Digitize or die” seems to be the ultimatum facing businesses these days, as competitors race for the technological tools that can give them an edge. Many find themselves wondering where to begin the transition. According to Rowan Trollope, SVP & GM of the collaboration technology group at Cisco Systems, Inc., the first order of business is better collaboration.

“When companies are digitizing, they need better collaboration tools. That’s the first thing they need,” Trollope told John Furrier, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, and Jim Burton, cofounder of UCStrategies. He contended that collaboration tools help make communication between IT and other employees as speedy and frictionless as digitization demands.

With the announcement of a $150 million development fund, Cisco is hoping to get talented developers to use Spark (Cisco’s unified communications service) as their collaboration platform. “We’ve implemented Spark on the latest cloud technologies, so it’s a DevOps model from start to finish,” he said.

Trollope spoke about integration of Spark into applications for ease of use and blendability. He said that APIs are the new interoperability and that they’ve facilitated integration.

Challenges of the new world

Trollope envisions a new world where technology isn’t something you have to deal with occasionally for tune-ups, but rather something that must be woven into the fabric of your business.

“Every company has to become a technology company,” he stated. “The question is how many of them are going to be able to make the transition. That’s a hard transition to make.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Enterprise Connect 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE