C is for Cloud … and Collaboration (Here's Why)

By Renee Bergeron 2

cloud partners

Today, those traditional productivity tools are no longer sufficient to propel an organization to a competitive level of collaboration. Today’s productivity comes from real-time, context-aware access to information — all within a collaboration framework.

Collaboration revolves around the inimitable way a team interacts within its business ecosystem. What used to happen around the conference table is now powered by email and social media — instantaneous, situation-aware exchanges that take place around the globe 24 hours a day.

No longer does being productive mean reviewing email at my desk, then answering messages on my land line and finally on my cell phone. Rather, employees need to have all those communication and productivity tools, including email, voice mail, business contacts and instant messaging, pulled together into one central, highly accessible environment where information is presented based on threads and discussion topics, while also being indexed and searchable.

To achieve that level of interaction means more than empowering smart phones and tablets for mobile access, it means developing an enterprise-class solution that leverages the cloud to deliver refined, streamlined collaboration tools to create an integrated ecosystem.

For solutions providers, success demands more than a series of point solutions that address the individual components of collaboration. Instead, they must deliver an integrated solution that creates an overarching collaboration solution bigger and more flexible than its individual parts. That solution will move business customers toward a single access point where all their collaboration tools – email, voice mail, contacts, messaging, document sharing – come to rest in a easily configurable, context-aware and highly accessible dashboard — powered by the agility and ubiquity of cloud.

renee bergeron