2018 is When Collaboration Will Make a BIG Impact

Graham Fry, Managing Director, avsnet

Positively energised! It’s the only phrase that describes how I’m feeling about the year ahead.

I am energised by businesses just starting out on their journeys towards greater productivity and efficiency in 2018. I’m excited for all the newly empowered IT departments saving time and money through the freedom of managed services and cloud technologies.

This feeling extends far into the workplace – to the teams already working better together thanks to agile, flexible workspaces and those who, for the first time over the next several months, will be using intuitive collaboration solutions underpinned by rock-solid, intuitive and most importantly, secure networks.

…AND let’s not forget the remote workers, all those hours saved commuting with visual communications. What about our tireless helpdesk staff? They now have maintenance providers and simple subscription services to take away the burden, cost and effort of maintaining their collaboration estates.

What’s my point?

It’s choice. BIG choice. The options, and therefore possibilities for workplace transformation, are larger than ever. We’re entering a golden age of collaboration where the majority of kinks (interoperability, the cloud’s immaturity, network capabilities) from years past are being rapidly ironed out.

Everywhere I look I see colleagues working better together, companies working with their suppliers and partners closer, higher productivity across the board and plenty of CFOs sitting happy.

Admittedly, many of you have worked in our industry for many-a-year and seen false starts, but I truly believe the earlier ‘Wild West’ days are fading into memory and the future looks extremely bright.

Businesses of all sizes are investing in collaboration and communication tools with impressive outcomes, manufacturers are enhancing their solutions with every iteration – Cisco Spark is a clear example of this – networks are becoming more intelligent, and user-adoption is flourishing.

As new generations enter the workplace, the user experiences that we are only just getting used to will become the status quo. For many of the businesses we work with this has already happened and they are working with us to deliver other capabilities for even greater improvements and efficiencies.

For this reason alone, 2018 is going to be a BIG year and everyone at avsnet is ready. Are you?