Virtual is Real... Well Almost

Travel budgets, outstation accommodation, conveyance amounts — the top three

components of manpower expenses are the first to bear the brunt of the finance

department to cut costs and increase profits. No wonder then that a company like

Webex has shown whopping growth percentages to the tune of 100 times just in the

last 10 years, and interestingly, around 60% of this growth is thanks to

first-time collaboration deployments across companies which are either mid-size

enterprises or in regions like India where broadband is just settling in.

Webex attempted to rubbish the fact that you need state-of-the-art

infrastructure in terms of non-stop connectivity and dedicated hardware to

recreate an environment where virtual is as close to real as possible. True, you

do need uninterrupted broadband to ensure enough bandwidth to be able to

integrate voice, data and video real time, but luckily for Webex, broadband

became hugely popular at least in India around the same time when they began

wooing the market here.

Webex believes after analyzing market feedback here over the last two years

that budgets, resistance towards setting up enterprise-class exchange servers

exclusively for collaboration and lack of sensible RoIs in comparison to

'travel-when-you-need-to' approach are the three biggest hurdles that prevented

(and to a certain extent still preventing) enterprises of any size to deploy

collaboration seriously. The SaaS format thus makes more sense since most

companies in India see growth spurts either unevenly or in exponentially high

magnitudes. If companies do approach the idea of collaboration with the 'pay as

you grow' philosophy, it will also help them realize in a step by step manner,

increased RoIs and significant reductions in travel budgets over a staggered

period of time.

Collaboration, according to Webex is best realized in 'disaggregated'

organizations that need to work with each other, by overcoming hurdles of

standardized software, common technology architecture and independent

operations. Collaboration also uses, to a great extent, the online space to

vertically integrate organizational monoliths and act as a catalyst for

standardization of human processes across various departments, sections and

projects.

There are three levels which an enterprise — big or small — can realize the

uses of a collaborative workforce. One of course is collaboration amongst

employees who are scattered around the world and need to brainstorm,

conceptualize projects, make strategic decisions, discuss growth plans, etc;

while the second stage of collaboration maturity is to envelop partners and

vendors within the collaboration network by giving external agencies access to

relevant information, virtually meet key officials of the company and hasten

collaborative projects. The third step is to accelerate all business processes,

and bring them under the umbrella of collaboration — employees, vendors, market

analysts, feedback agencies, etc.

An ideal starting point for this would be to begin with individual services

that allow meetings over the Internet, and step 2 is to utilize options of

sharing files as data, audio and video.

The third step is to archive this data for future use and give access to

individual or applications within the collaboration network. In terms of

business benefits, the starting point is absence of involving a dedicated 'IT

manager' to perform collaboration since most of it is designed in a DIY format.

Secondly, the 'pay by use' options eliminates expenses that companies are

recurring without use, and thirdly, the ability to archive, organize and retrace

data shared through collaborating, makes the collaboration setup an environment

that can be transferred, dissolved or reused at will.