The Next Step in Ubiquitous Collaboration

The industry is currently at a fascinating point – we have seen discrete, separate and difficult to operate video communications systems of old get fully integrated into the Unified Comms stack, and with decent intuitive programming seen a full adoption of these technologies in room based and telepresence systems, all the while showing the benefits they can bring to an organisation.

It was once touted that “the network is the computer” and with the advance to further data centric and cloud based offerings, the emphasis is definitely back on a robust, secure and scalable network underpinning all your business communication and collaboration tools.

In addition to this, the network has to be able to carry all enterprise applications and has to be, in Cisco’s parlance, “Borderless”. We need to link to trusted third parties and be accessible to highly mobile staff, linking into best efforts wireless access wherever they maybe.

At the same time there have been some excellent strides forward for ad-hoc on-the-fly conferencing and collaboration tools such as Google, Skype, Blue Jeans and total web, video and audio conferencing clients from the likes of Microsoft Lync and Cisco Jabber. All these listed technologies have succeeded due to their ease of use and intuitive user experience.

Add in the complexity of anyone wanting to be able to use the raft of ever expanding mobile (Apple, Blackberry & Android), laptop and tablet type technologies as an access device, and the task of tying all these different technologies together to give a suite of business communications tools which are truly flexible and useable becomes immense and daunting.

The truth is every organisation has a different starting point and most like to sweat historical investment. At avsnet we work with enterprise organisations to integrate all these communications tools together to give a single easy to use, self-administered solution for collaborative conferencing with the full video, audio and data media mix.

If a mobile executive can only join a conference by audio, when an iPad user can link in via video to a team that is in a room based solution, and a third party is on Skype, then we can tie all these solutions together to give a seamless experience where the participants concentrate on the business at hand, rather than the technology needed to do it.

avsnet consults by utilising an established workshop methodology to examine what the business has in terms of legacy tools and technologies, and how it has historically communicated with its key stakeholders (customers, suppliers & internal teams etc). We then let it know what else is possible and make recommendations to close the gap between its “current state” (legacy) and the “future state” of its communications. This follows through to POC testing and full production with a fully project managed and phased rollout.