Polycom Releases Top Seven Collaboration Technology Predictions for 2016, TD Reacts

5: The value of the cloud will reach far beyond collaboration connectivity

The cloud holds unique promise in delivering collaboration services. It is fundamentally changing how enterprises procure and consume services and is driving new usage models. In the past many small businesses viewed collaboration solutions as an unattainable luxury beyond their limited IT teams and budget. Cloud opens up opportunities for small businesses to operate on an equal footing to their larger competitors by scaling through easier access to collaboration services. However, what we anticipate will really open doors in 2016 are emerging over-the-top collaboration solutions that are expected to enhance productivity and interactivity for all businesses. Services such as analytics, diagnostics, translation and natural language processing will play a huge role in helping to advance user experience and arm customers with critical usage data and tools for more effective operations.

My Take: This is likely pushed by the constantly-emerging Internet of Things (IoT), but the point stands that the cloud could be the single most important aspect of technology to many companies in the coming years. As the world moves further online, as physical objects are outfitted with IP addresses, and as companies processes become more automated, the amount of data associated with these changes will be astounding. The cloud will not only be necessary to carry the bandwidth and collect this data, but it will be necessary to run the programs that will analyze this data as well. And the cloud needs to expand and become more powerful in order to handle the IoT movement that is ready to begin. Cloud companies will undoubtedly be pouring money into R & D to capitalize, and the cloud will become more and more prevalent as a result.

6: Collective memory helps conquer time zones

In 2015, Polycom predicted greater enterprise globalization would ultimately create a higher demand for more tools that enable visual collaboration. No matter how effective the communications network, it can’t mitigate the time zone challenges inherent in a global workforce. As the rapid expansion of globalization continues, we believe 2016 will be the year of video content capture. We expect a greater number of companies will adopt a “follow the sun” strategy which will place greater emphasis on collective memory – the ability to capture, persist and share relevant key information across the enterprise. We anticipate that will in turn drive adoption of solutions that allow users to seamlessly and simply capture video, audio and content collaboration, and support playback and analysis from any location at any time. We believe companies that focus on leveraging collective memory will be better able to preserve key intellectual property and maximize productivity, creativity and learning.

My Take: Lecture capture technology is important as collaboration tech continues to grow. If all of these meetings are happening across the world, and some of them at the same time, it’s important that all employees that need to view content are able to. When you no longer have to ensure everyone is in office to meet, you’re no longer going to ensure that. So some important meetings will happen without everyone that needs to be in the know present. By capturing these meetings and offering employees a way to view them after the fact, you’re ensuring everyone on the team is up-to-date when they need to be. And it won’t just be notes or summaries that these employees that missed out will have to peruse, but the entire meeting itself. That means nothing is missed, and everything runs more smoothly.

7: What you see is what we all see

Collaboration across locations and devices has rapidly improved thanks in large part to high-quality audio, content sharing and video solutions available in the market today. But we believe what will drive productivity in 2016, and ultimately provide a more powerful experience, are solutions that allow users to share high quality content automatically, simply and intuitively. Sharing presentations, documents and work products in real time is fundamental to collaboration and in the past it has been a challenge to do this consistently and reliably. New technologies will allow users to be confident that the content they see is being displayed accurately and clearly to their coworkers. Since collaboration often centers on more than one document, sharing multiple streams of multimedia, interactive content will become as easy or easier than plugging in a VGA cable today. Annotation, updating, recording and sharing of content will all be part of this rich experience.

My Take: We’ve written about what a collaboration system should be doing, and Polycom has touched on it a lot here. For many years the industry was unable to define collaboration, and when it has been defined new technology has emerged that has changed the definition. Today, a company can tout a simple video conferencing system as a collaboration system, but it still won’t have all of the collaborative capabilities that you might need. Now that collaboration systems are more robust, a singular definition is beginning to settle. Annotation, content-sharing, mirroring and capture are musts, and companies need to understand that they are getting all of this when they hear ‘collaboration system.’