NextiraOne has teamed up with collaboration partners Cisco, Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent to deliver a seminar the explored 'The Future of Collaboration'.
Addressing an audience of IT and communications managers from enterprise customers across a range of major industry sectors, the event included vendor presentations on topics including: network technologies that enable faster adoption of new applications and devices without impacting performance or security; building a Collaborative workspace and a demonstration of a Unified Communications platform.
Tim Banting, Head of Business Development - Collaboration for NextiraOne, led the event and commented: "Collaboration needs to be on the roadmap for large organisations as current communications methods are on borrowed time. Organisations that ignore Collaboration and continue using communications technologies that exist solely within corporate boundaries will be behind the curve in the next five years."
ith Gartner predicting that 90% of enterprises will support corporate applications on personal devices by 2014, NextiraOne believes that the important factors to consider when building Collaboration into an organisation remain constant: cost, functionality, security, integration and reliability.
However, the way organisations manage Collaboration is changing, with employees benefiting from flexible and mobile working across a multitude of devices and locations, high bandwidth-consuming applications, and access to corporate data beyond an organisation's physical boundaries.
Looking forward, Banting sees that organisations face a dilemma of maintaining control while extending the boundaries of the IT estate: "The Collaboration landscape is experiencing a significant change in working patterns and the use of consumer technology in the workplace. Without the right business tools,organisations are turning to consumer products such as public IM (instant messaging) services and free VoIP (Voice over the Internet) services to fill the gap. These unsanctioned services introduce security and compliance concerns.
"For most organisations, the majority of employees work within corporate boundaries, however, the growing remote workforce and trends such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) introduce something of a challenge. There is a need to find a way to offer employee-driven collaboration without compromising security, network capacity or performance. It seems that organisations are still confused about how to build and manage an infrastructure that combines Collaboration needs of both employees and the organisation."