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Perhaps nothing is moving business forward faster than collaboration.
Whether realtime or asynchronous, teams and individuals are communicating all day via text, audio, video and through document sharing.

The challenge for most businesses is that this collaboration isn’t just taking place in one application. In many case workers are bouncing between several different collaboration apps for a couples of reasons.

1. There are almost no truly interoperable collaboration tools that cover all of the needs for UC including voice, video, messaging and data. This lack of true simplicity has long plagued the UC space as meeting on many platforms is far more cumbersome than a simple Google Hangout, FaceTime or other off the shelf communication tool.

2. Shadow IT and IT Decision makers are having a battle between company approved solutions like Cisco and Microsoft Skype for Business, with group collaboration tools like Slack and Google.

The winner will be decided when those two challenges are addressed. Right now Cisco Spark and MS Skype for Business are the front runners to win this enterprise race. However, I’m not ruling out Slack, Polycom and several other up and comers like Videxio to impact this space.

One thing is for sure. Collaboration is more critical than ever to unify the enterprise. However, so long as we continue to use so many various tools even in a single company, we will be challenged to reach its full potential.

In this video I dive into these challenges further.

Photo Credit: PresseBox.de flickr via Compfight cc