At a time when enterprise software investments are trending town, companies may not be looking to invest in unified communications and collaboration tools.
But with the boost to business productivity, the contained costs, and the chance to be a good corporate citizen by reducing your company’s carbon footprint, it may be time to look at how collaboration tools — both enterprise-level and low-cost open-source solutions — can benefit your company.
“Providing employees with collaboration tools that enable them to work together effectively, no matter where they may be located, is no longer a wish-list or nice-to-have item — it’s a requirement,” said Kent Erickson, senior vice president and general manager of Workgroup Solutions for Novell.
Collaborative Business Models
According to an IDG survey, companies are interested in making sure knowledge workers use collaboration tools to increase organizational innovation, productivity and efficiency, with 67 percent of respondents saying it’s of critical or high importance. And 52 percent say it’s of critical or high importance that their knowledge workers have access to next-generation collaboration tools and software like wikis, blogs and online team work spaces.
With companies like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Novell aggressively pushing into the collaboration space, it’s clear that the expectations of the market are grand. IDC pegged the global collaboration market at $34 billion. The unified communications segment of the collaboration market — which includes instant messaging, Web presence, VoIP and videoconferencing — is expected to grow to $17 billion in annual revenue by 2011.
“We’ve seen a huge uptick in usage of our collaboration tools like WebEx and Telepresence,” said Grace Kim, a senior marketing manager for Cisco’s Collaboration Software Group. “Over the year, we’ve seen a 40 percent increase in usage of our collaboration tools. That’s a testament to the cost-effectiveness of collaboration.”
According to Kim, companies are fundamentally changing their…