IT as Business enabler: Trends to follow over next few years…

11. February 2009 by admin.

Information Technology (IT), as I came to realize over all these years, is a major support function for the business. With the on going economic recession, IT organizations are cash strapped and are not going to invest in newer technology.

But this can be changed if IT organizations can tie newer technologies directly to business needs which use technology to assist the business to increase revenue and reduce the over all cost of doing business. Money will come.

How can we, in IS/IT, help our business to increase revenue and help decrease cost at the same time?

Our answer will be to invest in a flexible and agile infrastructure, which will negate the current state of economy and its impact on business, by enabling the most valuable assets of any business in an inexpensive way. And we all know the most valuable asset of any business is its people and customers.

In short we need to transform from a self-defeating network to a self-defending network (as Cisco proclaims…)

Here are some business trends and corresponding new technologies to transform the way we do business today:

• At home workers
• Reduce leased square footage at corporate
• Move products/services to the Web (Internet)
• Simple contact center
• Support mobile work force and customer collaboration

The technologies we will see in action are:

• Collaboration Technology
  • WebEx Connect Clients
    • PC
    • MAC
    • IPhone
    • Blackberry

•  
  • WebEx Connect Space
    • Document Share
    • XMPP application (multi IM client connectivity with Video)

• Mobility solutions for the collaborative workforce
  • Single number reach
  • Presence – native in Call Manager
  • Context aware mobility
  • Secure Unified Communication and mobile access
  • Cloud Application like Email and Calendar services

All of these will give rise to the Unified Workspace…

So we are seeing a paradigm shift from IT support perspective and *Remote people are no longer half people*

In today’s blog we will start looking at Cisco’s WebEx collaboration platform architecture.

Cisco has recently announced that it is going to follow the “software-as-a-service” model for its WebEx Connect Collaboration Services. It will be hosted in Cisco’s cloud computing environment across their “global delivery network” spanning 4 continents…

No to mention that the WebEx Media Tone Network is a Service Provider grade network… The intelligent network element will be comprised of voice/video/QoS enabled network components.

The Cisco application element is comprised of WebEx Collaboration Solutions. The solution suite contains the following:

§         WebEx Connect

o       Jabber XMPP client federated with six or seven IM clients like GoogleTalk, MSN, Yahoo messengers, etc….

o       Native Call Manager integration for *Presence*

o       Shared Space (like SharePoint but based on open platform)

§         Business Specific Meeting Solutions

o       Event Calendar

o       Sales Calendar

o      

o      

o      

Any other custom applications like an billing application which will keep track of all cell phone/ email/desk phone and WebEx meetings for a lawyer with her specific client and then sending a report to another application which will send an invoice to the client.

WebEx clients are now available for PC, Linux and MAC platforms and for IPhone and blackberry handsets.

More to follow….

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