Craig Decker, Managing Director of EMEAR, Cisco opened the show with his keynote. Collaboration has been a strong theme throughout the year at Comms Business but Decker pointed out that the Channel now needs to focus on solving business issues rather than technology ones.
Decker spoke to Comms Business at the show and said “We are seeing a lot more of the teams type infrastructure. We have also seen how businesses have adopted some of the messaging apps from WhatsApp and other groups. All that has come together and now we are looking at these enterprises that have the opportunity to move to a more collaborative environment, how do you start solving their business issues rather than technology issues? That was really the message in my keynote.
“The opportunity for everyone as groups move from this disparate state to the cloud is all about the workforce and workplace transformation. The technology has been there for a decade, just not necessarily brought together. Cisco spent an inordinate amount of money securing it at a cloud level but now it’s about the partners understanding that the opportunity and that the value isn’t in the integration it’s in the workplace transformation, in the employee engagement models, solving the business problems.”
“One of the examples I used was as people move to more agile workspaces. When you go into enterprises today you could spend the first 30+ minutes trying to find somewhere to work. If you have an eight-hour working day and the first 30 minutes is zero productivity then agile is really taking away. They are real business problems to solve, how do we solve them with Machine Learning, AI and other capabilities will become part of it.
The opportunities are massive, the transitions to these digitised workplaces are underway and people are not slowing down. But they are not getting the rewards yet because we are not solving the right business problems. Employee engagement, change management and then solving the business issues.”