Collaboration crucial for SMEs: Cisco
Cisco Systems believes collaboration can help small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources save on the cost of expansion.
“Collaboration can help small and medium business and in some ways they are more dependent on it than even large companies because they do not have that many resources and most of them are trying to grow,” Patrick Romzek, vice president of worldwide market development and collaboration solutions, said last week.
A study has shown that, among companies under US$500 million (Bt16.4 billion), one of the top three priorities is collaboration technology because it is a substitute for human resources, he said.
Collaboration can help SMEs with 50-100 people because it allows employees to work more seamlessly together in terms of access to information that is shared via the cloud or technology such as video or audio conferencing along with social applications in smartphones.
Collaboration is 15 per cent of Cisco Systems’ $5-billion business in the past year. For every dollar spent for the collaboration business, $2.5 will be spent for infrastructure, so the collaboration business is actually synergistic with their other businesses.
About half a billion of the collaboration business came from SME clients. Asean, especially Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam, is the biggest-growing region for their collaboration business at 90-100 per cent last year.
Collaboration can also save IT expenses because most SMEs have disparate platforms and consolidating them all into one platform will save them money for hardware, software, services and staff, and other areas such as IT investment.
Travel costs can be reduced through video technology.
Other soft benefits from collaboration include an increase in productivity and efficiency in the workforce. It also drives the globalisation of the workforce, as many small businesses in the US, EU and Asean are global companies.
Some businesses with less than 200 employees actually have a presence in three to four countries with multiple locations due to exports.
There are multiple complications from various branches and headquarters and it is costly and complex to manage things without a single platform.
“If you have people in India to do the engineering and people in Mexico to do the manufacturing, how would you get people to work together?”
Collaboration technology allows them to do that but it is hard to quantify the benefits, as most are soft benefits such as productivity and people working better together along with sharing resources and expertise.
In terms of the Asean Economic Community, collaboration technology allows businesses to arrange meetings across borders with businesses and clients, so there are no geographic boundaries no matter what platforms are in use.
Video technology can also overcome language boundaries since it is easier to communicate with people of different accents and cultures via video than audio since their body language and non-verbal styles can be seen.
“Collaboration and video technology culturally make the world smaller because it is easier to work with people from different cultures with richer media via video conferencing versus traditional voice,” he added.
