There is a significant opportunity for AV and IT to further impact the BYOD (bring your own device) movement and address the challenges it creates in the corporate AV market. AV integrators and IT professionals need to determine how best to accommodate end users’ desires to access the same functionality and applications they enjoy in their personal lives while in a business environment. This consumer-based expectation for advanced capabilities and convenience coupled with cost saving opportunities is pushing IT to allow business use of personal devices.
As the BYOD movement continues to gain momentum across industries and verticals, professionals are challenging AV integrators and IT professionals to further blur the lines between consumer- and business-purpose technologies. Companies of all sizes are adopting the use of mobile devices, tablets, and smartphones by their employees. In a 2013 Spiceworks survey, over 60% of small-to-medium sized businesses were implementing BYOD policies, and more progressive companies were implementing Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions to address the BYOD trend. Tablet use for work and home is expected to triple by 2017, according to Forrester research.
David Fuller is Senior Director of International Sales & Technical Marketing for QSC Audio. QSC is a globally recognized manufacturer of audio solutions for huddle rooms to stadiums—and everything in between. QSC systems make it easy for your team to design and integrate flexible, scalable solutions and deliver the native IT integration and standards-based technology your customers expect. This is AV built for IT.
Certain technological capabilities seem to elude businesses adopting BYOD, even though they have been available for years on the consumer market. For example, average consumers can take advantage of Bluetooth functionality on both their phones and their cars to create a completely seamless transition from phone audio to car audio. With no action on their part after the initial pairing, drivers go from handheld to hands-free in a way that makes the technology completely invisible. It just works. But when users try to apply the same concept to a business setting, they run into problems.
Legacy in-room conferencing systems aren’t built to easily accept audio from an employee’s own laptop or tablet that is running a cloud-based web or video conferencing application. The end result is a drawn-out huddle just to get the meeting started.
QSC recently introduced an innovative way to connect audio from mobile devices to its in-room conferencing system. When meeting participants run audio from UC or web conferencing applications, they can easily connect the 2-way audio from that device to the Q-SYS platform using the Bluetooth and or Micro USB On-The-Go (OTG) connections on the low-cost TSC-7t Tabletop Touchscreen Dialer.
Solutions like these are contributing to a transparent collaboration experience where the focus is on the business, not the technology. The way Bluetooth works in vehicles is a great example of a transparent experience. When we get into our car, our devices know to connect audio through the car sound system. When we walk into a meeting room, our devices should also know and be able to connect audio through the room conferencing system.
BYOD is a large and complex challenge, but products like the TSC-7t—which enables employees to use their own devices to host conference calls with platforms like GoToMeeting, WebEx, Skype for Business, or other soft codecs—are making some aspects of BYOD easier to deal with.
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