Aragon Research Technology Arc™ for Collaboration, 2014

Authors: David Mario Smith, Jim Lundy

Date: February 14, 2014

Topic: Collaboration

Research Note Number: 2014-05

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Issue: What technologies and architectures should enterprises leverage?
Issue: What are the trends impacting collaboration?

Summary: Aragon Research introduces its first Technology Arc™ for Collaboration. Tech Arcs help our clients evaluate the maturity and market impact of many technologies in the workplace. This focused edition features 6 new technologies specific to the collaboration domain, plus special drill-down profiles for 22 others from our master Technology Arc for the Workplace.

Introduction
The Aragon Research Technology ArcTM helps you identify important technologies, choose
the ones to monitor, and determine their potential benefits. It also adds extra dimensions
that help you decide when, why and how you should adopt them. This is our first
adaptation of the Tech Arc to a specific application domain, in this case collaboration.
Collaboration has become an umbrella term for a myriad of technologies related to
enabling people to work together. The impact of social networking has moved enterprises
beyond B2B or B2C into person-to-person collaboration.
Social collaboration capabilities have brought the concept of social business deeper into
the enterprise mindset. The focus on social business is bringing business leaders to the
forefront of social collaboration technology decisions. Along with this comes a deeper
emphasis on analytics.
Social collaboration now merges with unified communication and collaboration (UCC),
where a key capability is presence, which enables real-time communications. The
integration of real-time functions into business applications and processes is an emerging
characteristic that puts collaborative interactions into context. This is more than just using
communication to enable a business process. It embeds the full range of communication
and collaboration capabilities into every phase of every business process. Presence, for
example, shows you the status of all the people involved in an ongoing activity so you can
decide how to interact with them in real time to handle exceptions or expedite an outcome.
The Aragon Research Technology Arcs are designed to help planners decide what
technologies are trending, when to invest in them and how to make use of them. They track
technologies through three sequential arcs of maturity: emerge, adopt and mature.

Note: This is part of Aragon’s archived research. Please visit our Coverage Areas page to view our most recent content.

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