Latin America. In 2019, companies are increasingly experiencing the dispersion and mobility of their workforce. This applies not only to employees, but also to key stakeholders and customers.
The need for better collaboration solutions to keep up with a more global industrial ecosystem is definitely a crucial factor to consider for your teams to stay connected and maintain collaboration and innovation.
That's why the company Multimedia has published a list of 9 trends on corporate collaboration for this year that begins:
Meeting rooms- Huddle Room
So what is a huddle room? The answer is, "Any meeting room or small space that is well equipped with technology, allowing small teams of people (typically between 5 and 12 people) to meet and collaborate in a private place."
And now you can think, why is that so fantastic? The answer is: This is a collaboration with minimal distraction, as it is an enclosed room that offers a private space for discussion and the exchange of ideas. So, it brings your team closer together.
It is important to keep spontaneity in mind, as brilliance does not wait for anyone. Meeting rooms allow you to come in whenever you want and start working as soon as the creative juices are flowing. This means you don't have to go through the hassle of booking processes.
Different types of meetings
The way we find ourselves is changing. We are witnessing an increasingly immediate collaboration, which is not even always scheduled. This requires the need to organize meetings faster, easier and with different types of devices.
We also see the need for greater group participation in meetings – meaning that meetings are not led by just one person – but by everyone. This means it's more vital than ever for collaboration tools to enable this new style of meeting. They should be simple and easy to use for anyone, that is, they should be easy to program and join.
This can be done with a "one button to press" feature for scheduling meetings. Doing so creates an address and the software scrapes the address, synchronizes it with the calendar, and invites you to the meeting room.
Legacy infrastructure facing the end of its useful life
As much as cloud services are growing – there are still many companies that use legacy hardware, which means they also have legacy infrastructure. And now these technologies are facing the end of their useful life, as the cloud is taking over them with the need for an entirely new team to upgrade them. It won't totally kill sales of legacy enterprise hardware, at least not yet.
Hardware is still important, and now you have to decide whether you want to register your cloud infrastructure or not. By doing so, you'll be able to benefit from several cloud traits:
* Flexibility – to work anywhere and from any device.
* Scalability – which happens automatically in the cloud.
* Ease of use – for everyone in your company, regardless.
* Profitability – as the requirement for the initial investment in hardware is zero.
Wireless meeting room
Imagine not having to deal with cables or adapters when setting up a meeting, connecting your presentation, or displaying something else from your screen. That's a wireless meeting room for you.
Anyone can connect their devices wirelessly – all it takes is a simple app or caller ID. You can even join remotely from anywhere in the world.
Virtual and augmented reality
While solutions for cloud collaboration bring people and teams together, virtual and augmented reality takes it to another level. It will allow collaboration and meetings to have an even more meaningful part in working life, as things can be explained in a more detailed and real way, making the experience much more immersive.
This type of technology can make the feeling of being disconnected disappear. A Goldman Sachss report claimed that market virtual reality and augmented reality combined are growing tremendously with the estimated size of the market, which will go from $80 billion to $182 billion by 2025.
Team collaboration as the axis of work
Last year marked a turning point for UC and cloud collaboration (UCC). According to Nemertes' "Unified Communications and Collaboration: 2019 Research Study," 67% of organizations now have at least a portion of their UCC applications in the cloud, while nearly a third are all cloud.
Cloud approaches vary, with larger enterprises relying more on hosted and customized services, while smaller organizations prefer the flexibility and lower cost of unified communications-as-a-service. As UCaaaS offerings mature and are increasingly able to support larger, global organizations, Nemertes expects a shift toward multi-tenancy as UCC's preferred cloud approach for organizations of all sizes.
According to the Nemertes study, almost half of companies currently use team collaboration applications, but, in many cases, workers still consider them as instant messaging tools. Expect an even greater focus on team collaboration in 2019, as UCC vendors make team collaboration the centerpiece of their UCC user experience. Vendors will focus not only on adoption, but on how to integrate external workflows and applications into team collaboration applications so that they become a true hub for internal and external collaboration.
Security comes to the fore
Just over a third of organizations now have a proactive UCC security strategy that combines auditing, mandatory use of encryption, monitoring, penetration testing, patching, and application firewalls capable of recognizing UCC traffic and protecting against attacks. UCC business leaders, in general, don't see threats of attack, denial of service, or data exfiltration as high-priority concerns. Unfortunately, a well-publicized attack may be necessary before IT leaders give UCC security the attention it deserves.
Video for more than just a conference
Video streaming is widely available through consumer platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Periscope, and Snapchat. As a result, people in the workplace are looking for the same ability to create and share videos instantly, or even stream them live. Use cases, such as supporting field workers, the ability for customer service agents to see what customers see, and the ability for video to replace written communications, are driving a growing interest in real-time video support.
Video streaming is a growing collaborative trend, with nearly 20% of organizations currently supporting video streaming, while another 14% plan to do so in 2019. A quarter of organizations have implemented an enterprise content delivery network to optimize video streaming over their network, while another 13% plan to implement an enterprise content delivery network in 2019.
Application and workflow integration
Integrating collaboration, customer service, workflows, and other business applications is one of the primary goals of digital transformation efforts that seek to use emerging technology to deliver new capabilities, both internally and externally. In recent years, a growing number of UCC vendors now offer APIs to enable customers to integrate communications features into their existing applications or create new custom applications for functions such as reporting and call management.
Text written by the Mexican company Multimedia.
