“By 2024, remote work and changing workforce demographics will impact enterprise meetings so that only 20% will take place fully in-person, down from over 60% in 2019.”
– 2021 Gartner Market Guide for Professional and Managed Services for Meeting Solutions
I grew up during the ’80s and ’90s. Imagine if the pandemic happened then. We wouldn’t have had the ability to stay connected while being socially distanced as we can today. Back then, videoconferencing required expensive on-premises equipment and costly bandwidth at each endpoint to have an adequate meeting. And document sharing? Forget about it. Work would have looked drastically different back then during a pandemic. For the majority of companies, work would have come to a halt.
The business world was already going through a digital transformation before COVID-19 struck last year. The global pandemic accelerated the collaboration trend by several years. More workers than ever before now have video endpoints sitting on their desktops that extend the office into their homes.
IT departments had to respond quickly to the crisis, often adopting a three-phased strategy:
- Get everyone working from home
- Pushout mass updates simultaneously to an all-remote workforce
- Figure out“How can we create an environment to host meaningful meetings and increase productivity?”
The New Digital Workplace
We now can say the future is hybrid. Yes, there will still be in-person meetings, events and conferences, but we need to plan with a digital component in mind, which is why a collaboration strategy is so important.
Collaboration seldom occurs in a single location anymore; it happens across time zones, geographies, IP addresses and networks. Extending security to each of these endpoints and environments is imperative for success, and it doesn’t just happen automatically. Forming a security-centric collaboration strategy is essential.
Addressing The Complexities of Collaboration Planning
Collaboration and meeting solution providers have been developing new products with several new features and capabilities at record speed since the pandemic. Virtual meeting solution requirements are increasingly complex and have outpaced the ability of many IT departments to successfully architect, implement and manage those solutions -Gartner. It’s no longer adequate to enable remote workers to call into an audio conference via a landline. They need IP-enabled video and audio along with the ability to share files in real-time. Enabling these work requirements necessitates a combination of cloud and on-premises (i.e., hybrid) infrastructure, along with applications and services working together to create a seamless user experience.
Looking at the “new office,” Presidio is helping customers enhance their current capabilities to bring the office where their employees are. Every aspect of collaboration has a human touch to it, and we help customers become future-ready. It’s about connecting people, and companies can’t afford to make a mistake with their most valuable resource—their employees.
When most companies are asked, “What’s the difference between you and the competition?” their answer is almost always, “Our people.” Collaboration helps to bring internal teams together and put their best assets in front of their customers.
At Presidio, we specialize in designing, implementing and executing digital workplaces that are user-centric and drive productivity and business outcomes.
Gartner Market Guide for Professional and Managed Services for Meeting Solutions, Tom Eagle, Katja Ruud, 10th May 2021
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