Migration to the cloud is the most significant development in the lifetime of companies in the unified communications and collaboration space, said two panelists at the IMCCA’s Lunch and Learn event Wednesday.
- “In two years, the world has changed — the adoption of new collaboration technologies has been really fast,” said Nigel Hodgson of Kramer, whose company is now selling traditional hardware almost as an afterthought. "What is important is the solution, which involves technologies that two years ago we thought we probably wouldn’t be handling.”
Chris Barwick of Cisco added, “The biggest transition we’ve seen is movement to the cloud.” However, he added that some customers are not able to transfer completely to cloud provision. “We need to be able to deliver this experience to customers no matter how they decide to deploy.”
Security issues also received an airing. Tom-Erik Lia of Videxio commented that the cloud provides a more secure channel for companies that don’t have the necessary in-house security personnel for an on-premise deployment. “We get a lot more customers coming to the cloud because they want the security that a dedicated service partner provides.”
Scott Cruikshank of Dimension Data commented, “Security in the technology is only as good as what you do as an organization. Looking at your overall security policies and procedures is extremely important. We can no longer look at UC as a silo from a security perspective. The threats are coming from everywhere.”
JP Carney of Revolabs commented that users sometimes shy away from new technologies because one part of the solution — often audio — isn't specified correctly. “Those kinds of environments really cause fatigue on users. It’s funny how the technology is all there, but getting people to use it and getting the right solutions out there is the hard part.”
The panel closed by with opinions on what the big industry topics will be in a year’s time.
“Hopefully, it’ll be the continued evolution of the user experience,” said Tim Rich of AVI-SPL. “Solutions continue to become more standardized, consistent and drive user adoption.”
Simen Teigre of Pexip said, “I hope we’ll be talking about how things just work. I’m hopeful that jointly we can make that happen — [though] it may not be all ready next year.”
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