Collaboration as a Service Gains Momentum

Human talent fuels the business model creativity and process execution that drives today's leading enterprise innovations -- the ones that every executive truly wants to emulate. That's why savvy managers will always choose to hire the best talent -- regardless of where those key people may reside.

The common obstacle, of course, is finding both productive and cost effective ways to regularly bring together a geographically distributed talent pool. Online collaboration is one approach many business leaders will consider.

The growth of globally disbursed teams demands that online collaboration tools are flexible, scalable and easy to deploy. Moreover, project-centric teams often can't predict the "when and where" they’ll need to reunite their subject matter experts for an impromptu task.

IT managers are increasingly being told to move from a rigid just-in-case technology investment model to a much more agile just-in-time methodology. So, what's fueling that new momentum?

More Haste, Less Waste
The current economic realities require business leaders to be able to move to action quickly -- it's all about increased haste, but absolutely no waste. It's a challenging environment, for sure.

Managed or hosted collaboration solutions are proven to be a perfect fit for these types of scenarios. How do you plan to incorporate these new services? Consider adding Collaboration as a Service (CaaS) to your company's internal IT service portfolio.

CaaS is a subscription based service that can provide your organization with reliable and secure on-demand collaboration solutions -- all at a predictable and affordable price.

According to a recent Nemertes Research market study, more enterprises are turning to Managed Services Providers (MSPs) to reduce implementation and operational costs of their collaboration applications.

Demand for Rich-Media Collaboration
Adoption has grown from 27% to 63% of study participants from 2006 to 2008, with management of collaboration applications -- especially rich-media services -- as a key driver for growth. For example, 33% initially utilize VoIP solutions, as demand for real-time, rich-media collaboration applications continues to grow.

New platforms have emerged for managed service providers. Cisco unveiled a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture and enhancements to its SaaS-based collaborative applications.

"Adoption of SaaS and cloud services represent a growing share of finite and expensive WAN bandwidth," said Abner Germanow, director at IDC. "Until recently, SaaS and cloud services were delivered on a best effort basis that will not be good enough to meet the business criticality, performance, and video service demands facing future waves of SaaS and cloud service maturity."