At today's Cisco Collaboration summit in Los Angeles, the company discussed how the nature of work is changing to a world of bring your own device (BYOD), bring your own apps (BYOA), and work wherever you are. We see this in our research as well. Over three quarters of the IT leaders that Lopez Research surveyed are allowing BYOD and nearly the same number said that they believe their employees were using consumer apps at work (BYOA). While most companies weren’t officially supporting BYOA, most IT leaders are investigating what is required to manage and secure corporate data for BYOA.
One area that continues to experience disruption from BYOA is collaboration and document sharing. The next generation of collaboration solutions should offer ad hoc collaboration both within our organization and across company boundaries. We’ve also discussed the concept of rich communications that moves seamlessly from messaging to voice and video for years. However, this vision has failed to materialize in enterprise software. While we’ve had robust collaboration and video systems, consumer applications for messaging and video were still easier to use. And while IT complained of the quality and security issues associated with consumer-oriented solutions, employees adopted these solutions in droves because they were easier to use and mobile friendly.
Even Cisco agrees that traditional collaboration solutions have had challenges. It said the reality of collaboration solutions has been that not everyone can participate and that the features aren’t the same as you move across devices. As we move to a mobile cloud, the industry needs a new set of collaboration tools to deal with the future of work. On the bright side, we’re starting to see movement in this direction with tools like the newly announced Project Squared.
Project Squared looks like a mashup between Webex, video chat and virtual meeting rooms. You can instantly start a one-to-one or team meeting room with anyone from inside or outside your company. You can start a group video sync up with a single tap. In addition to the Web, the service runs on multiple operating systems, including iOS, Android, and Mac. Some of the usability enhancement include a graphical user experience is cleaner. It also looks and feels more like a mobile app and includes touch capability and native app style navigation for the operating systems listed above. It also allows you to view documents right in your room along side your messages without any download required. On a mobile device, the preview looked good. And given that it’s an enterprise app, it obviously sends messages and files securely. Like other document storage and sharing services, everything can be stored and synced across devices so you can always have the latest information. It also integrates with Box so you can share an updated file from a Box folder right into a Project Squared room on your mobile device.
Effectively, it looks and feels like a next generation mobile cloud app. Despite it's apparent consumer style, it still offers the bells and whistles that IT would expect such as automated provisioning, security, policy and access controls. It also offers user adoption and engagement analytics, which are important for any mobile-oriented service. Adoptiuon is the new ROI and you can't prove it if you don't measure it. All Cisco products should look and feel as simple as Project Squared. However, herein lies the challenge. Cisco has many collaboration products that you can buy. While I don't expect anyone to yank out their pricey telepresence rooms and move completely to Project Squared, it does leave the question of how Cisco plans to simplify the overall collaboration offering and how it will price these services moving forward. I expect we'll all continue to have a myriad of web, video and messaging solutions for some time.
