Collaboration will be a major theme for Cisco Expo 2013 South Africa, and the team at Cisco SA is forecasting what to expect next year.
Gawie Herholdt, consulting systems engineer at Cisco SA, provides a view of prospects for collaboration markets in the coming year. Herholdt is the collaboration expert for Cisco SA and will be at Cisco Expo 2013, giving visitors the opportunity to find out more about his take on collaboration in 2013.
1) Mobile adoption will accelerate post PC-era
Fewer people will use desktop PCs to collaborate. Boundaries between families, workers and friends will continue to vanish as people's lives become intertwined with their mobile devices. As a result, IT managers will look for options that enable workers to collaborate on their own terms. Employees will increasingly access presence, instant messaging, voice, video, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing capabilities via apps built for their mobile devices, and will insist on a consistent user experience (whether Android, iPhone, RIM or another). As a result, businesses will go from managing multiple company apps to managing apps for a single employee across multiple platforms, including PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones. The enterprise app store model will take off since businesses can track, manage and deliver applications to workers, and developers can bill based on actual usage.
2) Video will break through
Inter-company collaboration with video will become more pervasive as companies of all sizes share in-person experiences inside and outside their companies with customers, partners and vendors. We will see product innovation to support demand for interoperable inter-company collaboration with secure text, voice, real-time video and presence capabilities across multiple device platforms. Video will capitalise on the ease of use of touch- and gesture-based devices in the marketplace, enabling greater adoption of video for collaboration and business transformation. Simplified through automation, employees will be able to instantly capture video, and those videos will be automatically uploaded to their companies' intranet.
3) Contact centres will evolve as customers interact with companies in radically new ways
Customer service centres will enable more proactive communications to their customers, and customers will interact with agents through a variety of consumer-type mobile applications. Customers will use voice, video, chat, social media and the Web to interact with agents to resolve their issues. Mid-sized and smaller companies will provide world-class customer care enabled by packaged customer collaboration solutions and cost-effective hosted solutions. Agents will enjoy working from anywhere, as collaboration-enabled virtualised desktop environments become viable, cost-effective alternatives for enterprises. Companies will increasingly demand desktop virtualisation solutions.
4) Companies will use the cloud and desktop virtualisation to provide collaboration capabilities
Enterprise adoption of cloud-based collaboration will continue at a record pace in the post PC-era as partner offerings become more attractive. Unified communications will become one of the top elements for enterprise cloud strategies as part of a hosted collaboration offering. Companies will increasingly demand desktop virtualisation solutions that enable employees to access data when they need it, from any location, at any time. Video conferencing cloud services will enable small/mid-size businesses to use video to collaborate inside and outside their company without the infrastructure investment required for video.
5) Social business processes will become mainstream
In 2013, employees will use social business tools more often to be more productive at work, as business applications are "collaboration-enabled" by social software platforms. For example, from within structured, task-driven applications like CRM, people will be able to see their colleagues' activity, find experts and ask questions. This type of social interaction will proliferate with the advent of HTML5 and as more developers use open standards such as XMPP and public Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to support platform services. Micro-blogging and instant messaging will also come together, connected via a "unified follow model" that combines today's "buddy list" with the enterprise social graph.
Cisco looks forward to showcasing its various collaboration solutions at Cisco Expo 2013 South Africa. The expo is a registration-only event. For more information, click here.
Share