On this New Product Alert, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr speaks with Andy Johnson, leader with Cisco’s product marketing team for collaboration devices, at WebexOne 2026. This conversation explores the evolution of Cisco Workplace Designer and its expanded capabilities for planning intelligent workplace environments. Andy demonstrates how the platform brings together collaboration, networking, and workplace technologies to help organizations design more connected and efficient spaces across entire buildings and campuses.
Craig Durr: Everybody, it’s Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and I’m here at WebexOne 2026. Again, the thing I like to bring you here is all the great solutions that are coming to market, and there are some great ones announced today on the main stage. One of them that I'm really excited to learn more about is called Workplace Designer. Now, we've spoken about Work Space Designer in the past, but this is an evolution of this and taking it farther. And I've got just the right person to walk me through it. Please meet Andy Johnson.
Andy Johnson: Hey Craig, how are you doing?
Craig Durr: He's a leader with the product marketing team for collaboration devices. How are you doing?
Andy Johnson: I'm very good. Yeah, very busy.
Craig Durr: Yeah, I know this is a great show. You guys have a lot going on. It's so busy, in fact, that you don't have anyone from your team that can walk me through this. So I believe this solution is so easy that even a manager and an analyst can walk through it together.
Andy Johnson: Well, let's give it a go. Okay, let's do that.
Craig Durr: So we've seen this before, but talk to me about what we are entering right now.
Andy Johnson: This is the new intelligent Workplace Designer. It's going to come in November, and what we're really trying to do is move from designing for an individual space to moving for a whole floor or a whole building…
Craig Durr: Even a campus
Andy Johnson: Yeah, and you know, just thinking about cross technology use cases and making sure that you've got a full solution to enable the kind of use cases you really want to deliver as a workplace experience.
Craig Durr: So this is actually that intelligent workspace experience you were talking about. This is Connected Intelligence, but it goes across product lines, if we will. We're talking collaboration, wireless access, networking as well, right? Why don't we jump in and talk about it right now?
Andy Johnson: Let's try and design a workplace.
Craig Durr: There it is. So if I remember correctly, because I'm an analyst, I can help you do this as well. If we want to, we can go ahead and enter in the address and find the address. But you've already got the Austin Building of Cisco loaded up here right now, right?
Andy Johnson: Absolutely. Really, what we want to do next is choose some of the use cases that you want to see. Now, the experiences you want to build for your end users.
Craig Durr: This is one of the things I thought was really powerful because what this does for me is this bridges the story between IT, real estate facilities because they all have different use cases, right? And I love how you guys have this laid out. If I may, we're scrolling through some facilities that might be interested in terms of asset intelligence and tracking, right? A space that's very near and dear to your heart. We might be doing video collaboration.
Andy Johnson: We might want to do some wayfinding. Okay, perfect. People can find their way around the building.
Craig Durr: That's perfect, too. Okay, so we selected three use cases.
Andy Johnson: And now you apply use cases.
Craig Durr: Okay, we'll apply those. So easy, an analyst can do it.
Andy Johnson: Yeah, and so now we've got a building, and we could do a little estimate if you want to see there, or do you want to go in and refine the design?
Craig Durr: Let's refine the design just a little bit more.
Andy Johnson: All right, so what we can do is we click on the building, and here we can put an individual floor lamp.
Craig Durr: Oh, perfect. And we'll design the solution. Let's do that. So now we're blowing in. So this is actually the 13th floor of the Austin building, right? I'm told that it is actually taking CAD designs and uploading this so that it is a true-to-life digital twin, or what we're looking at.
Andy Johnson: Can import your 2D design, your 2D floor plan to create a 3D crawl.
Craig Durr: Okay
Andy Johnson: And of course, it recognizes the walls and where you've got room.
Craig Durr: And I love that it works like this with the board. They interact in this. All right, so let's go ahead and auto play some access points right now. So right now we'll do the future proof Wi-Fi. We'll add this here. So what am I looking at here?
Andy Johnson: Now, you can see we've auto placed all the Wi-Fi APs that you need to to future proof yourself for future use cases. And what you see is a coverage map. And because we're future proof, we put a really dense population of bees in there, so you can see we've got really good coverage in pretty much the whole floor. There's a couple of amber spots, etc.
Craig Durr: But if I tap into one of them, I might…
Andy Johnson: A little double click. You can see what coverage you get from an individual.
Craig Durr: But now I can understand how this works and when it works… overview and goes from there. I love it.
Andy Johnson: If you click that again, we'll spend the whole workshop here.
Craig Durr: All right. Let's go to another one. So the video conferencing is one that I really like here as well.
Andy Johnson: On the collabor, you want to do the collaboration.
Craig Durr: Oh, I'm sorry. Let's do that. We'll do this, and we apply those rooms as well.
Andy Johnson: So same thing again. We're going to auto populate based on our experience and based on the types of rooms you got. What are the kinds of rooms that you're gonna want to see?
Craig Durr: So here's one right here. For example, if we want to go into Sound Exchange and we want to see what it looks like. Now, this is the experience I've seen before. This is Workspace, so what you just showed me is this was where we started last year when. Looking at experience, we've taken this out to the entire floor.
Andy Johnson: Yeah, and you know we're continuing to make improvements here. For example, I can choose my software.
Craig Durr: This is perfect. So now you have Google Meet here as well. So down to the individual level room, I can have this configured for video collaboration. I can make sure of my Wi-Fi access points. There's other use cases that my peers and facilities or real estate might be looking for as well.
Andy Johnson: And if you ask, you can add some summary.
Craig Durr: So we're not saving the designs. Now, we're back out to where we are here. We can look at the view estimate. Oh, I recognize this. This is almost like a bill of materials, right?
Andy Johnson: Exactly. You get a full bill of material estimates for what you're going to need for those use cases that you chose earlier. So you've got all your wireless access points that you're going to need. I'm going to come down. I can see how many rooms of different types and different collaboration devices.
Craig Durr: This is fantastic. I love it. And of course, it's got all the products there, just ready to go. This is awesome. So, when is this going to be available for everyone to see?
Andy Johnson: This is coming in November. So look out for it. Sounds fine. You can still use a workspace designer, which is their individual rooms, but this broader application is coming very soon.
Craig Durr: I love it. I love the fact that you're bridging that story between IT, real estate, facilities, and making those use cases just one shared experience. All right, Andy, I appreciated it. You proved me right. It was so easy that even a product leader and an analyst could drive through this thing as well.
Anyway, everyone, this is Craig Durr coming to you from WebexOne 2026. We'll bring you some more updates shortly. Stay tuned.