Last week the AGT team participated in the annual Wainhouse Research Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) Summit in Santa Clara, Calif. The UC&C Summit offers business managers, IT / conferencing professionals & leading vendors, integrators and resellers the perfect meeting place to learn the latest developments in the industry and hear from well-known analysts and thought leaders. Here are a few thoughts from the event from our CEO, Mark Cray, who attended and also spoke on a panel, titled “Stepping In and Beyond the Meeting Room.”
“During the first day of the summit, we tweeted, “Only 1 in 4 users surveyed by Wainhouse think that the deployment of mobile and personal video will cause group video conferencing to decline within their organization. AV looks to be here to stay.” It seems to be counter-intuitive to what we are supposed to believe, but the meeting room — now more commonly designed as a “huddle room” — is still a very important space for businesses. In fact, with shared workspaces and “hot desking,” it seems as though the huddle room has become a vital productivity space. Outside of a table and a few chairs, the next most important object in the room is the display and collaboration equipment. Why are people in the room? They are in the room to collaborate, to share information, to solve problems. When you marry together a well-designed space, the right equipment and a great collaboration tool, you have created an environment where work groups and project teams can be successful.
The second day of the Wainhouse UC&C Summit included a speaker from a global pharmaceutical company that had implemented purpose-built collaboration rooms. They measured that these rooms have supported the completion of over 1,300 projects and had strong use cases of proven impact. They have seen a fast ROI from their collaboration rooms and attribute them with helping deliver products with less time to market.
The pharmaceutical example is what a visual collaboration solution should deliver when properly designed, deployed and managed. I’m still somewhat surprised today to hear that so many companies still have major issues with A/V and their overall meeting room environment. But that’s okay, you can see the same results from your collaboration environment once you’ve got it properly managed and designed to meet your business requirements.”
AGT Speaks at Wainhouse UC&C Summit on “Stepping In and Beyond the Meeting Room.”
