Collaboration – Proliferation vs One Size Fits All
By Jim Lundy
I’ve covered Collaboration technologies for years and there have been winners and losers along the way.
The Collaboration Wars have evolved and changed. No longer is it one vendor who wins it all. This blog discusses the proliferation of collaboration and a new era of cooperation.
Collaboration Wars – Email Was the Anchor
In the old days, the vendor that won the email war, then proclaimed themselves as the winner of all collaboration. Today many IT buyers subscribe to that theory and one vendor Microsoft has benefited. However, email is no longer the de facto application and IT is not the sole decision maker when it comes to buying collaboration products and services.
Best of Breed Era
The Best of Breed era started years ago and it was promoted by Venture funded companies and the products were adopted by users who were tired of bad products being promoted or mandated by IT. The battle cry then was that your users are out of control. The reality is they were not out of control – they were licensing products that helped them to get ahead.
Video Conferencing Era
Covid came along and another revolution started. Zoom came out of nowhere and helped to make video meetings the new dial tone. Others saw this and nearly every vendor had to improve their video conferencing products during Covid.
In fact the market has pivoted and Aragon was the first research firm to declare the Video Conferencing Market as an Intelligent (AI based) market. The issue is that until recently, you had to leverage poor WebRTC integrations to make the video meetings work together.
A New Era of Collaboration – Led by Cisco and Microsoft
It is nice to see two market leaders starting to collaborate. Last week at Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft and Cisco announced that Microsoft Teams meetings would be capable of running on Cisco Meeting hardware.
Some say that this will hurt the licensing of Webex meeting licenses, our take is that this will be good for Cisco and Microsoft. The reason is because Teams is great for internal meetings, while Cisco is good for that and for external meetings. Aragon expects more vendors to offer more interoperability between video conferencing platforms going forward
Bottom Line
Enterprises continue to buy Collaboration services from multiple vendors. The move towards better interoperability means that buyers win. The integration of providers offerings – which is starting with Video Conferencing is a great start and enterprises should continue to push for better interoperability from their Collaboration suppliers. There is more to come in this story. Developing…..
Employee Engagement and the New Way of Work
The pandemic taught every enterprise a big lesson–work from anywhere is real and so is the need to engage with employees. The era of Talent Management is over. The new focus is employees and engagement.
On Wednesday, October 26, join Aragon CEO and lead analyst, Jim Lundy, to discuss this new focus on Employee Engagement and the technologies worth leveraging to keep people engaged.
Key topics include:
- Trends driving the shift to Employee Engagement
- What are the technologies and methodologies to enable better ways to get work done and also engage employees?
- How can enterprises gain a competitive advantage by focusing on Employee Engagement?
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO, Jim Lundy.
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