原创 Collaboration tech transforms the way we live, work and play

Collaboration technologies as a whole, encompassing emerging voice, video, social and other platforms, have played a transformational role in the way humans live, work and play over the past 10 years. Lynda Graton's testimonial book, "The Shift: Future of Work," plays out the future in a globalised, technology-centric and carbon-efficient economy.

With rapid growth in the cloud-based consumption of IT services, the next few years starting with 2013 will witness a tipping point owing to the confluence of consumer and enterprise social platforms, ubiquitous video (the "New Voice") enablement, and, exponential growth in smart mobile/personal devices accessing the Internet.

Emerging web-based enterprise social platforms with fully integrated, enterprise quality video, coupled with high-end video analytics, and, video/voice/text content management + search capabilities will disrupt traditional applications centred primarily on email and text-based documents for business collaboration. Delivery of this experience via mobile/personal devices (BYOD) from the cloud (private, public, hybrid) will fulfil the anytime-anywhere business collaboration experience. A similar pattern can be expected in the consumer social platform space once cost structures for large volume, self-service deployments are optimised.

In parallel with human-to-human collaboration, an exponentially increasing trend for machine-to-machine collaboration via autonomic networks will provide a rich fabric of basic and value-added collaboration services. Auto-discovery of device and service touch-points together with rapid adoption of IPv6 will facilitate the growth of on-demand, ad-hoc collaboration between individuals and/or communities via self-organized network overlays. Apart from companies like Cisco, there is a lot of active research in academia to realise the deployment of such technologies.
In summary, collaboration technologies will increasingly accelerate the emergence of a truly globally connected society and workforce.

- Narayanan Subramaniam, Principal Engineer, Voice, Video & Collaboration Technologies, Cisco Systems