2012: Where to next for collaboration?

Taken individually, each one of these trends by itself is very powerful.  Taken together, what we see is transformational.  We are witnessing the end of the dominance of the PC era and a shift to a post PC world. 

What do these changes look like?

n Mobile:  The impact of the growth of mobile devices cannot be understated.  New smart phones and tablets based on Android, Windows Phone and iOS are growing at phenomenal rates. As people bring their own devices to work and expect to connect to the corporate network, we predict this bring your own device trend to mushroom. 

n Social:  The consumerisation of enterprise IT has driven not only the uptake of different devices but also fuelled social media growth.  We’re seeing the proliferation of social media applications in organisations of every size, across every part of Asia. 

n Video:  Video is having a profound impact on the way we do business in today’s digitally connected world.  It’s no longer just used in conferencing and training, but in areas such as remote healthcare and banking, live problem resolution in manufacturing, global interviewing in HR, virtual receptionists, and many others. According to the 2011 Interactive Media Studies Enterprise Web Communications Survey, one-third of all corporations say they’re using videos at least once a week.

n Virtual: As more businesses look to host their employees’ desktops on a remote central server, instead of on the local storage of a remote client, the demand for hosted virtual desktops is set to explode. According to Gartner, the worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013 to reach 49 million units, up from more than 500,000 units in 2009.  

 

Combine these changes together and we step into a new world, one where the PC loses its role within enterprise and where any device becomes a business device. Welcome to the Post-PC Era.  In the past, PCs dominated, and work was done at the office.  Today, enterprises exist without boundaries and the personal and the professional life have merged. 

2012 will be the start of the demise of the PC within organisations across Asia. We’ll see desks getting less cluttered, employees using a wealth of different devices and the rise of the virtualised desktop. The IT department of 2012 will support the myriad devices, operating systems, and architectures that employees choose to work with. And it’s not only their employees that will be harnessing a holistic mix of applications and devices. Customers, partners and suppliers too will all be changing the way that they work.

As the desktop PC becomes far less relevant, its place will be taken by the hosted virtual workstation, sitting right at the heart of the new workplace and challenging the very paradigm of the traditional PC.  The hosted virtual workstation is a game changer for the entire industry and businesses will make a significant shift from traditional desktops towards virtual workspaces.  In fact, Gartner expects the hosted virtual desktop environment to rise to 70 million units by 2014.

Currently, hosted virtual environments cater mainly to data applications, not rich interactive media, mobile devices, real time and video applications.  This is set to change as the use of video becomes ever more prevalent. Our Cisco Visual Networking Index found that Internet video is expected to increase from 40 per cent to 62 per cent of all Internet traffic by the end of 2015. This is a significant upsurge and as more businesses move to hosted virtual environments, they will expect their workstation to be able to support the everyday applications and services that they use.  A collaborative, interactive work environment will become the norm.

And that’s where we expect to be in 2012.   More businesses across the region will enable their employees to complete work anywhere across the globe, via any device and platform, and communicate via new applications that are people and social centric. Desktop computing is changing and in today’s ever mobile society, collaboration has never been as important.