Collaboration is no longer "nice to have". In a tightening
economic environment, collaboration is becoming a competitive
necessity, with technology playing a key role in delivering it.
One posting on a ‘collaboration’ blog recently asked, ‘Given
recent events, it's fair to say that IT managers everywhere are
going to be asked, "OK, so what can you do to help us get through
this downturn?" One of the suggestions was the use of open source
collaboration solutions which offer a combination of cutting-edge
capabilities and lower operating costs.
Collaboration has been described as the next phase of the
Internet, and a $34 billion market opportunity. So this Executive
overview of Innovate: Collaborate will examine the burgeoning
relationship between innovation and collaboration and put key
collaborative issues into context, such as the importance of
‘presence’ and whether unified communications can or should be
delivered as a service.
With IT budgets largely holding up, despite the current economic
times, collaboration and unified communications deployments
continue to grow in the enterprise. According to US research group
Nemertes, 84% of companies are now planning or deploying unified
communications. Dispersed workgroup locations, rising travel costs,
and new telepresence technologies mean more than 47% of IT
executives say they are deploying or planning to deploy unified
communications, up 17% in 2007.
For some, presence, rather than VoIP, is the real foundation for
unified communications (UC). If UC is a platform, rather than a
product, then the long term goal of UC should be to take tools and
embed them into business applications which allow users to alter
business processes and create new ones. Embedding such tools into
applications allows us to automate or make more intelligent
communication choices about the way we work, and presence is what
provides the intelligence.
This overview will use a case study to answer the questions of
how, what, why and when collaborative technologies should be used:
to create innovation, empower individuals, generate cost savings
and business competitiveness, and deliver communications on a
global scale.