ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Video communication key technology for tomorrow
With tomorrow ’ s workforce either choosing to becoming increasingly mobile or increasingly work from home , unified collaborative communication is key for the enterprise , explains Peter Quinlan at Tata Communications .
Communication and collaboration , from instant messaging and video calling to document sharing and email , relies on the Internet
Unified collaborative communication is key for enabling businesses across all industries to boost their productivity . Today , flexibility is a consideration for existing employees and potential employees when assessing a workplace - they increasingly look for mobile and remote working opportunities especially in global organisations . It has been estimated that close to a billion of the global workforce telecommutes today , with around a third of us working from home part time , and a tenth full time .
To enable telecommuting , businesses are increasingly adopting bring-yourown-device policies to better facilitate mobile working amongst employees . This is expected to increase more than two-fold from today , with 85 % of enterprises using
BYOD in the next four years . Teleworking is also set to encourage gender diversity in the workforce .
It is crucial that any enterprise planning to offer employees work from home options has the necessary communication and collaboration tools in place to be able to reap the full productivity benefits of teleworking .
One major challenge is that unified collaborative communication consists of many different communication tools that need to work together seamlessly and in an interoperable manner . In many enterprises , this is easier said than done . Over the course of several years , an enterprise can acquire a range of different conferencing systems and instant messaging tools . With each new round of procurement , this mix of technologies becomes harder to integrate together .
An additional pain point is that , when an enterprise expands into a new market through the acquisition of another company , the new entity ’ s systems end up being sometimes incompatible with the parent company ’ s systems .
A major challenge to adoption is also due to siloes that get created when organisations choose solutions based on vendor roadmaps and deploying technologies that do not interoperate . As such , these create islands of deployments which hinder adoption and are difficult to administer .
To minimise capital investment , most companies are now choosing to move their unified collaborative communication tools to the cloud , and adopt unified
18 Issue 04 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS