4. Workspaces are morphing to support new work styles

Where you work is now wherever you are and this is driving an important shift in enterprise facilities planning and IT. Visual collaboration is no longer confined to the conference room and the desk, but is extending throughout the enterprise and into virtual spaces outside the office. Audio, content sharing and video communications are no longer just conference room technologies, but now permeate every workspace inside and out of the office. In 2016, we believe the industry will place a renewed focus on enabling a wide range of workspaces, expanding huddle/smaller rooms and demonstrate an increasing desire for center-of-the-room collaboration solutions. Wainhouse Research estimates there to be 30-50 million huddle rooms around the world, the vast majority of which are lacking support for collaboration. While traditional conference rooms are still valuable for presentations, we believe they will be increasingly augmented by spaces designed to support rich collaboration and new working styles in virtual rooms, huddle rooms and open spaces. We expect this will place a much greater emphasis on tapping into the power of face to face collaboration, whether people are in the same room or spread around the world. Innovative new solutions will enable any space to support these interactions and the traditional conference room as we know it today will become more multi-functional and far easier to use.

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.

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.

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.

In the last twelve months, the market has seen changes that have made an incredible impact on the way corporate decisions are made. Previously, many enterprises looked at collaboration tools as “nice-to-have” but not integral to daily operations. Today, we are crossing the chasm and we believe collaboration has become mission critical. Millennials are now the largest component of the workforce and have brought their collaboration tools and behaviors with them. Enterprises are making collaboration a strategic initiative by refactoring workspaces beyond traditional conference rooms and rapidly expanding mobility solutions to allow work to happen wherever people are and whenever they prefer. Cloud is making access to collaboration services ubiquitous and leveling the playing field for enterprises of all sizes. New solutions will enable new spaces, mobile work patterns and center of the room, rich, multimedia collaboration. In 2016, we believe we will see the emergence of this Workplace of the Future, where collaboration is part of the fabric of business – available in any workspace, integrated with any task or workflow and empowering the end user with simple and delightful user experience.

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