`The Concept of Workspace is Replacing that of Workplace’

What opportunities does the field of collaboration hold in store for developers?

Collaboration is one of the biggest areas that has been seeing a lot of traction in the last 3-4 years if you go back in time, along with mobility, analytics and cloud computing. These are all working very closely. I see this as a very green area from 3 points of view:

A) When you are building new products in collaboration: E-mail also was considered to be `collaboration' 20-30 years back. It is the same for social now. This will become more important in the near future in the years to come by.

B) Integration with consumer social media: Any product being launched today looks towards integration with social media

C) Unified Communications: This deals with the merger between the phone and the desktop. Skype was one of the early guys in this area, now we have website chat-based support in addition to voice & video interactions.

What are the hindrances in India for more development opportunities in collaboration?

In India the biggest challenge so far has been bandwidth. People have always been on low-bandwidth connections. But thanks to price drops by telecom companies in mobile data access, this is set to change. Particularly, video is picking up pretty fast.

What is the reason you are considering both social media & collaboration together?

Collaboration is the more overarching topic whereas social media is a part of it. Collaboration has classifications such as within the company, outside the company (such as partners), etc. But you can exercise some formal control over your partners. Social media is collaboration with customers, who being outside the company, cannot be controlled.

The trend these days is that the concept of `workspace' is replacing `workplace'. Small companies want niche skills in their employees and these are not necessarily available in the same place. They are getting people (such as developers) to work from various locations, so collaboration from remote locations becomes important. Video conferencing, knowledge management, etc. all require collaboration. Hence it becomes important to developers.