The Impact Of Coronavirus

We are now 2 weeks past the end of ISE and fingers crossed it seems that our decision to attend the show has not only been validated by the amazing results but also the avoidance of any health impacts (other than late night created!). 

This does not mean that talk of Coronavirus or Covid-19 has disappeared, in fact just the opposite. For us we see three distinct impact points.

Firstly we are rightly putting our people first and closely monitoring travel requirements, facilitating/encouraging home working if required and also offering lots of health advice.

Secondly we are looking closely at our supply chain, we know there will be an impact and are working closely with our suppliers to minimise any shortages. 

The above will go away with Coronavirus. What will not go away is the increase in businesses reviewing their ability to use collaboration solutions. The restriction of travel really tests how robust company collaboration solutions are and many now realise that they rely on at best a web cam attached to someone's laptop and at worst a mobile phone propped up at the end of a table (who hasn't done that?) in the majority of their meeting spaces.

With the explosion of platform based conferencing solutions such as Teams, Google and Zoom the access to conferencing and collaboration is easier than it's ever been, almost everyone has company provided platform tools on all their devices. We are already seeing a massive increase in the deployment of conferencing USB based hardware however less than 5% of potential spaces are equipped. The current situation is now driving people to really look at their meeting space requirements and as an industry we can materially impact on how well companies deploy solutions.

This means having a 'platform first' conversation then deploying hardware based on how spaces are being used, do you JOIN a fixed platform, BRING in your own compute or SELECT a platform?. Every enterprise uses all three of these user cases and need solutions to facilitate the best result in each case . It also means proper user adoption programs - often something that's missed.

Being at the Visual Edge Of Platform is a great place to be, we have an amazing opportunity to impact on the way enterprises communicate and how this fits into their workflow. The current situation is having terrible consequences for many thousands of people and businesses. It also highlights our responsibility to ensure we advice users correctly on how to collaborate and communicate effectively.