By Cath Everett
July 28 2008
Organisations are increasingly deploying collaboration tools as a means of deriving more value from their converged IP networks and to support ever-rising levels of flexible and mobile working.
Although the widespread abuse of the term "collaboration tools" has led to a range of definitions emerging, based on which vendor one happens to speak to, in the broadest sense, collaboration tools comprise software that enables users to work together wherever they happen to be located.
As a result, in the case of asynchronous or non-real-time transactions, the sector could be said to encompass everything from email to voice calls, although the expression is more commonly used in association with synchronous or real-time transactions. These include instant messaging, audio, video and web conferencing sessions, diary management and document sharing.
Brian Condron, business development manager at communication systems integrator Affiniti, explains: "It is about enabling organisations to enhance their productivity and customer responsiveness. Customer service is a key driver.
"Companies are trying to reduce the amount of time they spend processing transactions and also improve the way they handle them by making more intelligent use of information in order to drive end-user satisfaction."
Using the green banner
While many large organisations have been deploying collaboration technology for some time, higher travel costs and an increase in mobile and remote working practices are driving growth in the mid-market, often under the banner of "green IT". This is particularly true in sectors with a dispersed workforce of knowledge workers, such as professional and financial services, although adoption is rising across all sectors.
Mark Hatton, managing director of distributor Sphinx, which sells Alcatel equipment, says: "Remote working is a well established practice, but the next evolution in the market is deploying software tools to allow that to happen more effectively. Everyone is used to accessing email using a PDA and SSL VPN, but they want to do more."
A common starting point for many organisations is to deploy their own audio conferencing kit rather than rely on third party providers. This is because such providers tend to charge on a per call or per minute basis, which can prove expensive if high numbers of transactions take place.
The next step is often to explore corporate instant messaging and diary management systems, followed by video conferencing, document and application sharing or web conferencing, which includes support for Power-Point presentations.
But before such moves take place, most companies tend to have either implemented an IP-based converged network or to be in the process of implementing one, with a view to adding applications that can generate additional value for the business at a later date.
Key link to mobility
Condron says: "A lot of organisations are embarking on a communications transformation journey, which may take a couple of years. But collaboration is an attractive proposition in this context as it sits in the middle between the applications and the infrastructure environment. It provides a key link to mobility, helping to make people more effective in their roles."
As a result, such tools are often used as an incentive to either seed the market for introducing IP infrastructure or to drive more value from it for a smaller incremental investment once the network and related telephony applications have bedded down.
Tony Corlett, product development director at voice and data consultancy Azzurri Communications, says: "IP networks do not do much to add value to what customers do as they are no more than plumbing that allows you to deploy applications. It is only when you get to things like collaboration tools that people can recognise the real value of being able to communicate or access information in real time."
Therefore, such initiatives involve more of a solutions sell based on clear business benefits than a technical one, which means that providing consultancy and other services tends to be an important part of the process.
Condron says: "A lot of this is about trying to understand what the customer is trying to achieve. It is necessary to take a couple of steps back in order to look at their business objectives and desired outcomes, as collaboration cannot be viewed in
isolation."
Because collaboration tools are linked to many areas of the business they need to considered within a wide context in order to understand the potential knock-on effects elsewhere.
Despite this, getting such implementations right is generally less about the technology per se and more about changing business processes and existing staff behaviour.
Corlett says: "For these projects to be successful, change management is a big thing. If it is not dealt with, there is a risk that organisations will compound their problems and collaboration tools will simply become a sticking plaster."
Effective communication is key to ensure that staff understand the benefits and are willing to contribute to solving organisational challenges. "You can put in the most elegant solution in the world and it will take three minutes for people to bypass it," Corlett warns.
Training and support
Providing training and access to support facilities such as helpdesks is also important. "People always say 'these systems are very intuitive and if you use a PC already, you will be able to use them', but that is not always the case," says Condron.
Further considerations are the size and configuration of the existing network as well as ensuring that suitable quality of service levels are in place. Many customers start with the notion that they can use the internet as a replacement for their corporate network, but in most instances this is simply not the case.
"Sometimes it is about shifting expectations around the fact that they have to invest first in a fit-for-purpose network in order to connect to a real-time environment, which involves looking at the infrastructure itself to find the pinch points," says Corlett.
This is because local area network and wide area network links need to be robust and provide enough bandwidth to meet requirements, particularly if video conferencing equipment is deployed.
In the enterprise market, there is much business to be had around integrating existing siloed systems. These tend to have sprung up at the departmental level without the say-so of the IT department, which means they are often not under its control.
"You will often see different departments that have set up their own contracts for services on a pay-as-you-go basis rather than it being a corporate-driven initiative. But security can become a big issue here, policies do not tend to be followed and it can be expensive as departments will not necessarily have negotiated the best deals," says Condron.
Mark Adams, unified communications practice manager at systems integrator Logicalis, says it is necessary to take an holistic view of requirements to come up with a roadmap of priorities.
"Although many vendors tend to say 'rip out your old systems and put in new ones', that is not tenable for anybody. So you need to deconstruct and reconstruct. It is about ripping down the walls between silos and integrating different environments, as that drives real value," he says.
Market penetration
As to where the collaboration tools sector is likely to go over the next few years, there appear to be several key directions. Although market penetration in a general sense is expected to rise as organisations introduce more home and flexible working policies, such offerings are also likely to become increasingly integrated into applications ranging from Microsoft-based desktop applications to enterprise systems such as SAP.
Hatton says: "There will be tighter integration of organisations' software assets so that staff can access all the information they need and be able to collaborate using any system or device. But this will not just apply to internal staff. Business partners such as suppliers and customers will also be able to collaborate using the same information."
Adams points to the mobility as being particularly significant. This is because, as the workforce becomes less office-based, smartphones become more sophisticated and 3G data networks more widespread, collaboration technologies ranging from instant messaging to audio and video conferencing will migrate steadily over to the platform.
"It is about taking corporate tools and putting them on a mobile device. I have already seen a couple of demos and it is conceptually there, so we will see it in some form over the next couple of years," Adams says.
But he is also seeing growing interest in the area of collaborative or shared workspaces. These are secure virtual "rooms" that enable staff and third parties to exchange and access information and interact with each other in real-time.
Although products such as Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration and document management environment and Cisco's WebEx Connect web conferencing offering are being used, they do not have the same penetration as other technologies and people are now wanting to ensure that their workspaces are connected, rather than existing in silos, Adams says.
Over time, Condron anticipates that such technology will develop into what he calls virtual workspaces, where content will be stored more permanently than for the duration of a single session.
"Collaboration is now much more about being in real-time, but if there were a virtual workspace, you could bring all forms of communication into one area and everyone could be informed of updates as they occurred. This means virtual teams would have access to the information they needed at any time," he says.
Condron believes Cisco is likely to move in this direction by integrating its WebEx with its Latitude Communications audio conferencing acquisition, and Microsoft will do the same with SharePoint and its LiveMeeting web conferencing product.
"These products will naturally tie together, so we will see the manufacturers driving down this route over the next two or three years," he says.
Another area that is likely to grow in importance is social networking. Organisations already recognise the value of sites like Facebook and YouTube and are exploring how things like blogs and wikis could be used, but few are putting a toe in the water because they are unsure about how to deal with the cultural ramifications of such deployments.
"People have realised that there has got to be a better way to disseminate information than sending a blanket email to the company and that wikis can be a nice way for people to access information if subject matter experts are unavailable," Adams says.
"We are also seeing a lot of interest in how sites like YouTube can be used to communicate to internal and external groups, as video is a good way of processing information in an easy-to-digest format."
The problem is that although such offerings are easy to implement in a technical sense, they have change management implications. For example, should a chief executive be keen to write a blog to communicate information to staff, issues such as what is feasible to publish and whether the corporate culture can cope with personnel responding negatively have to be thought through.
"The key challenges around this are cultural because enterprise norms have not been decided on yet. There is an implicit view on how you write emails - for example, do not write in capitals because it is like shouting at people. But there are no standards in the collaboration area as to what is acceptable, and so involving people in functions like marketing and HR is crucial," says Adams.
Outlook for the market
Although it is still relatively early days for the collaboration tools sector in all of its manifestations, the market is expected to mature rapidly. This is not least because of growing uptake in the consumer space, which raises staff expectations of what tools should be available to them in the business sphere.
Steve Odart, director at reseller Ixxus, says: "I think this is going to be an increasingly significant market purely because of the adoption of freer workstyles such as home-working and the globalised economy. It means there is a huge requirement to help people to work more effectively even if they are not in the same physical environment, and the only way to achieve this is with collaboration tools."
