The New Collaboration Landscape

By Collaboration Ecosystems

Leveraging New Generation Solutions for a Changing Market

In the AV and IT channel, we’ve all been bombarded in recent years with analysis and opinions on how IT and AV are increasingly warring, or perhaps converging? AV vs. IT is always a contentious topic. What fresh can we say about the topic that pros in the field don’t already know? And what – as we forge ahead into 2020 – can offer us a roadmap to navigate what we all see as a hyper-charged and fast moving collaboration landscape that is based on increasingly overlapped AV and IT networks?

As AV systems increasingly are tied into customers’ IT systems, it’s easy for tech analysts, business development professions, and product specifiers to get lost in the weeds of AV and IT “speeds and feeds”, i.e. technical specs. But, heads up: the market is changing under their feet. The most important new trends are being driven by neither AV nor IT product specs but by broader enterprise trends and broader demographic/workforce trends. And at the heart of that: the workplace, and the workforce, has changed, and it’s all about the fulfilling the needs of the new “anywhere, anytime” workforce.

Put aside your favorite AV or collaboration platform vendor’s newest product specs for a moment, and step back and consider this timeline:

  • The telephone: it took 75 years after its launch, to get to 50million users
  • Automobiles: it took 62 years to get 50 million users
  • TV: it took 14 years to reach that milestone
  • Spotify: it took 8 years

Ready for a quantum leap? Forget the 50M milestone:

  • There will be 100 billion connected devices (personal and business) by 2025
  • 1.2 trillion Google searches are conducted annually

Now let’s plug in some user trends:

  • In the U.S., 72.3% of workforce will work from a mobile location in 2020.

(At least that was the projection before the COVID-19 crisis. By the end of the year, that percentage will certainly be far higher.)

  • In the midst of all this “connectedness”, oddly, 65% of executives think that siloed information and siloed teams are the biggest barrier to communication.

Where is this leading? To the greatest market opportunity for half a century for IT, IT/AV, and technology-enabled collaboration going forward. At the heart of the trend: an increasingly “anywhere, anytime” workforce (including more younger workers that bring their tech expectations to the workplace) whose collaboration you must now facilitate, while simultaneously helping the enterprise secure the data that all of those devices and users spawn.

As the workplace, and the workforce, has changed, if you’re in the channel you need to align your product and service offerings (as well as your own internal systems) with the new demographics and the new way collaboration, and network security, are managed. The enterprise today is all about talent acquisition, training of the workforce, and the transformation of the workforce. And from the employee side of that equation: a BYOD (bring your own device) mentality. And add to that, hardware/software trends that are moving forward fast: videoconferencing in now more about soft-codec solutions, and application platform systems (Microsoft Teams, etc) being integrated into UCC to make it all more user-friendly and affordable.

To the daunting task of facilitating more connectedness and collaboration while simultaneously increasing the security of the data that all of your company’s devices and users spawn – to the rescue comes the consumerization of IT, as companies like Microsoft, Google, Cisco, and more leverage vast resources and vast user bases and AI-driven innovation and better API’s to marry the worlds of IT and BYOD and BYOD-like ease of use for collaboration, including visually-based collaboration, on many levels. All, with the best security tools.

In 2020 and well beyond, there is huge growth opportunity for the channel in offering new-gen collaboration solutions. But to do it successfully, you need to understand the new ecosystems, be trained ahead of time, and have someone to support you for the first few sales cycles and beyond. That’s where a great Distributor partner comes in. They can bring all of the network, application, and hardware solutions and help you get that critical “trusted advisor” status with your customers.