Xperience Center Tour: Inside the Cisco Experience Center in Paris, France

Summary

On this episode of the Xperience Center Tour, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr, Founder and Chief Analyst, explores the Cisco Experience Center in Paris, France. Set within a restored historic villa, this location seamlessly integrates heritage architecture with Cisco’s innovative collaboration and workplace technologies. Craig walks through the space, highlighting how Cisco has reimagined its Paris office to reflect modern work principles through design, technology integration, and efficient space utilization.

Their discussion covers:

• Historic Meets Modern: How Cisco transformed a centuries-old villa into a hub for innovation and collaboration
• Smarter Workspaces: The role of Cisco Spaces in optimizing office use, from desk reservations to real-time building management
• Collaboration in Action: A look inside the Idea Lab, where Cisco teams co-create with customers to bring concepts from ideation to market
• Efficient Footprint: How Cisco reduced its real estate space while improving productivity for its 600 Paris-based employees
• Future-Ready Innovation: Insights into how Cisco’s Paris hub exemplifies the company’s evolving approach to workplace experience and technology

Transcript

Craig Durr: Hey, everybody. This is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective. I find myself surrounded by artwork, by architecture, by beautiful spaces in the middle of Paris, France.

It's an incredible space that I'm walking through right now, which is actually a historic villa, and it's something that you would think I might be doing as part of a museum tour, or kind of a historic tour, to understand what's taking place here. But no, where I am actually is the Cisco Customer Experience Center located in the middle of Paris, France. This office has actually been around this historic building and actually retrofitted with the new technology. It is one of the most interesting and coolest spaces I've seen in terms of being enabled for the modern way we work.

This is not a full experience center tour video, but this is just a quick glimpse in terms of how Cisco has actually integrated some of its technology into this historic space and then built its more modern building around this.

Come with me, and let's go take a look here at the Cisco Experience Briefing Center in Paris, France.

Craig Durr: Where I'm standing right now is in the front courtyard of the old historic manor that we're talking about now. What Cisco told me when I've been here is that originally they were located in one of the suburbs of Paris. A couple years ago, they wound up moving to this location, and in doing so, they actually reduced their footprint to a smaller space—not only in the effort of what they might have been doing in terms of some of the real estate strategies, but by physically moving to downtown Paris to what was more limited real estate.

Now, they have about 600 employees based out of the Parisian area. With the addition of Splunk, in the last year or so, they've added about another 80 to 100 as what I'm told, but through their collaboration technology, Cisco Spaces, they wind up using this space a lot more efficiently than they had even they did at their previous location.

Think room desktop reservations. Think about knowing when colleagues are coming in. Think about even optimizing the building for the building management system. It's a really beautiful space, and it all started with this very old manor here.

Craig Durr: Well, of course, we're going to find technology here at the Cisco Experience Center. Not only does it host the collaboration business unit that I'm very interested in, but also all of the other product lines and business units as well, everything from Splunk to some really cool things that I had a chance to see, like the Idea Lab—this is where they work, side by side with customers, actually taking ideas from ideation to prototype to actually putting it in market, and even taking some of those one off proof of concepts and making them into full fledged products. Come check out this space with me.

Craig Durr: Thank you guys so much for taking the time to join me here on this quick tour of the Cisco Experience Center.