It’s almost the universal truth of business today… the more people collaborate, the more productive they are —because they can exchange ideas, interact and communicate easily and quickly from anywhere, on any device. Innovative collaboration solutions are driving real, impactful change in business by seamlessly connecting people to people, people to systems, systems to systems, ultimately connecting information and accelerating the pace of quality & insightful decision making.
So, what is it that has changed? What are we doing differently today? Beyond business gains, organizations today are leveraging collaboration platforms to attract top talent, improve their team’s ability to collaborate easily, provide a consistent experience anywhere, anytime, and connect platforms to access data for decision making while addressing security and privacy concerns. According to IDC “by 2021, 65% of G2000 companies will offer co working and remote-work options that leverage pervasive access to enterprise and collaboration applications.
Why collaborate
Many organizations are grappling to identify the right workplace collaboration tools that foster a culture of communication to enable productivity, improve customer service, work effectively on sales opportunities, enable solution design and development, project management and marketing. Business leaders are weighing the pros and cons of different kinds of communication depending on where team members are located. Whether it is simple messaging or videoconferencing the idea is to establish relationships between team members, who never meet, but still develop trust.
As companies enable workers to access data from any location, and on any device, cloud-based collaboration systems are gaining momentum. While security still seems to be a concern for many, both on prem and cloud collaboration tools are helping to seamlessly exchange critical data.
Collaboration at Cisco
Collaboration has become a religion at Cisco. The ability to seamlessly connect direct, virtual and cross functional teams and workgroups across cities, countries and geographies has led to the development of a digitally enabled global workforce, increased productivity, attracting and retaining top talent, and reducing the business risk in areas like security and data privacy. The centre of our strategy, the glue that binds everything and everyone together is WebEx ( WebEx Meetings and WebEx Teams). It has redefined the concept of meetings and how we connect, collaborate and are able to respond to demanding situations internally and with our customers and partners faster that anyone else in our business. It is pervasive across all our devices across all offices around the world. It supports a consistent user experience, no matter where and how the technology is used.
Platforms like WebEx which are natively equipped with video, audio, chat and content sharing that works on any device, help connect anywhere, anytime, with anyone. One simple click on the “join meeting” Big Green Button is all that needs to be done! The ease with which Cisco collaboration solutions are enabling creation of virtual, always on workplaces out of a physical location is helping conduct more productive meetings that translate to business in real time.
Today’s Cisco customers are seeing benefits of collaboration and are looking at ways in which they can take collaboration to the next level with right-sized, right-priced solutions that are easy to use, manage and deploy. This would help them empower employees, customers and partners to collaborate and drive the next wave of hyper productivity in their organizations.
Cisco’s intuitive collaboration tools bring teams & workgroups together in the way that works best because teams are securely connected. Work gets done faster. Decisions are made quickly. Employees are happier. Statistically speaking, more than 1 billion people worldwide collaborate using Cisco WebEx every month and 95% fortune 500 companies get 110% from their teams.
What the future holds
Today we believe that organizations have just touched the tip of the iceberg in using collaboration technology to improve employee efficiency. The next generation solutions will leverage AI & Cognitive features to further enhance employee efficiency, and make the user experience easier and also helping them take much more informed decisions. Aside from the shiny new technologies, the future will also bring more practical improvements, giving the user deeper and contextual insights and personalization with more tightly integrated technologies across platforms and reduced overall TCO. Need we say more?
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