good morning or good afternoon depending on your time zone my name is jenny rhodes marketing manager here at unifi square and i'd like to welcome you to our powerchat webinar of the month secrets to unified communication success in the age of hybrid work as was the case last month we're purposely straying away from our traditional one-way format today's webinar will be a conversational panel discussion between our two speakers to give you a variety of insights and opinions the unifi square power chat webinar series is a regular discussion with one of our unifi square industry experts and occasional guests we've purposely named this series powerchat for two reasons first we're shamelessly advertising our industry-leading powersuite software and services offering which offers solutions for all the major platforms microsoft teams skype for business and zoom second each webinar is only 30 minutes in length every month we dive into a key topic or issue affecting the work stream collaboration and unified communications ecosystems and explore major trends key debates and of course offer up our opinions and best practices please feel free to submit your questions at any time during the webinar we'll try to answer them during the webinar if possible but if we don't get to them during the live session we'll be sure to email you back directly after the webinar with an answer and don't forget at the end of the webinar we'll be doing a random drawing from those of you who are still tuned in for a job or speak 710 wireless speakerphone now let's dive into our exciting secrets to unified success in the age of hybrid work topic i'd like to introduce you to our speakers sunu agarwal founder and the chief technology officer of unifi square and erwin lazar president and principal analyst at metrogee irwin can you tell us a little bit more about what we'll be covering in today's webinar yeah thank you jenny and welcome to everyone who's able to join us today um so we'll talk uh we will go through some quick introductions as we we already uh started to do and then we'll talk about some of the trends that we're seeing that will impact success in 2021 so where we'll discuss where people are spending money and how budgets are changing to support this new normal of a distributed hybrid workforce we'll talk about some of the the requirements in order to successfully support the collaborative needs and the the ability to put people on a level playing field and ensure that no matter where somebody is they can effectively communicate and collaborate we'll talk about where some of the trends are beginning to change in 21 and beyond where we think the collaboration market is heading we'll talk about some of the needs for management and effective security and what are the things that you have to measure to ensure success and to measure where you are against the goals that you've set for yourself and then wrap up with some conclusions awesome and can you tell us just a little bit more about messaging research yeah i appreciate the opportunity uh so we are a pretty new company we launched in january of this year so i guess we're almost three months old now uh and so we we spun out of a company called numerous research we uh memories have been around since 2002. we uh the mercedes had covered kind of distinct groups the collaboration and contact center market as well as security and network we essentially split along those lines and we spend our time going out and gathering data from end user organizations we try and understand not just what are companies spending and why are they spending their their money and what their what strategic technologies are they are they placing their bets in but what are the characteristics of successful implementations and and strategies we'll talk more about that as we go along thank you for that overview let's go ahead and dive into some discussion topics here erwin i'd like to start with you you've conducted some research recently into what successful companies are doing with respect to collaboration spending could you share with us how you define success and some of the highlights of this research sure this was a global study of 476 it leaders who had either operational or financial responsibility for communication collaboration in their organization meaning that they they owned purchasing decisions or they again operated around the systems and so we took from those 476 companies we asked them questions that would help us understand if they had measured any demonstrable quality quantitative value from their collaboration investments we looked at did they save any money did they generate increased revenue and did they improve productivity and then we looked at the segment who had and we identified 85 companies who had above average return on investment or gain in productivity and we classified those as our success group but when we looked at what are they doing differently where are they placing their bets and so one of the first areas we looked at was budget so we looked at where companies were increasing spending over uh over the the 2021 calendar year and we looked at the percentage of companies within our success group that we're increasing spending versus the percentage of companies outside of our success group and we subtracted those two and came up with what you see here and so you can see the success group is much more likely to be increasing spending on security on broadening collaboration applications going beyond team collaboration and video into things like project and workflow management virtual and digital whiteboard but then they're also spending uh money on video conferencing and video conferencing endpoints to improve that quality of experience and prepare for that hybrid workforce when people are not only just in the office but working from home and trying to get everyone onto a level playing playing field thank you for those insights and sonu what are you seeing out in the field what are customers focusing on in 2021 um customers are really now in 2021 looking at the road ahead the next couple years and thinking about how can they equip remote work and return to work for long-term success um the two scenarios are going to coexist for a long long while if not indefinitely um and so customers are thinking through what is the new normal going to be um in terms of a substantially larger fraction of the workforce out working from home much of the time yet needing to have high quality interaction with people those people that do come into the office and how how can customers make that a cohesive experience for everyone involved for example video everywhere and making video a first-class citizen and in all interactions that that's a big topic on customers minds absolutely and i think that segways really well into our next question which um is for you erwin what does your research show with respect to how successful companies are supporting this work from home right now yeah so we have seen obviously this this probably the least surprising data point that i share in our study is that the majority of people work from home now 87 up from 72 in the early days of the pandemic um about of those 87 to work from home more than half are full-time and if we go to the the next slide what we have seen from an organizational standpoint is that companies are the companies that are successful are the ones that are embracing that home worker from an i.t perspective and what i mean by that is you know i came from an i.t background before i got into research and analysis and we were kind of very early days of work from home it was still dial-up back then but you know i saw not change over the last 20 years which is the i.t perspective had always been you know if you work from home good luck you're on your own we're not going to support you we're not going to deal with your home wi-fi issues or your your internet issues or so on we think that that's has to change and and it is changing in the study results that we saw here the purple bars show you the percentage of successful companies that are embracing things like providing guidance to pick the right isp plan to do a home wi-fi assessment to help people deal with the fact that you know many people don't have network expertise many people are in home environments where they might have contention issues say kids that are in school remotely spouses that are working as well they may not have insight into voice and video quality and performance management and they may also need to help people understand how do you optimize that video experience so you know make sure you're front lit rather than backlit not sitting behind a bright open window or things like that so we can see across the board uh the the companies that are more successful are more likely to proactively embrace that home office treat it as the new office and provide it support to those home workers absolutely and to that and sonu how are you seeing customers provide management to support to remote workers how are management needs changing uh so after erwin said successful companies are really taking a proactive stance and leaning into um equipping work from home users for success rather than sort of taking a traditional um hands-off i.t approach
um in some ways they're doing it um include uh first taking a holistic perspective so providing a service desk that can uh look at a user's issues end-to-end uh not just on the technical details but also the optical details and other experiential details and providing the support through analytics to to help identify help users identify the specific issues for example isd issues or other issues users have an opportunity to improve fantastic and as you mentioned earlier sonu we're nearing a time where we're going to have a hybrid workforce with some people working remote some back in the office and irwin what are you seeing that companies are doing in terms of planning for a return to the office yeah i think uh you know somebody said we are definitely heading to we're not going back to the way things were before we're not going to back to an environment where okay pandemics over everybody come back sit at your desk again and go back into the conference room i think uh organizations have found value in having people work from home from a cost savings perspective from a quality of life perspective and employees for the most part have um have seen value but not everybody wants to work from home and what we found in our research is that we ask participants assuming the pandemic is under control in 21 what are you planning for in terms of bringing people back to the office about 21 percent told us that they want to bring people back either full-time or part-time they feel there's value in having people engage in the office and build relationships culture improve productivity and collaboration by you know again being able to go and talk to to another co-worker but the vast majority over 78 percent uh they expect that either employees will stay at home and or we're going to require you to stay at home meaning we we don't want you back in the office we want we see value in not having you here again we're reducing costs and so on uh and about 38 or 36 percent that say that we're going to give it uh give employees the choice if you want to come in fine we'll have a place for you to work if you don't you know stay home uh we're we'll we're fine with that too and so what that really positions companies or tells uh from an i.t perspective is that you need to think about you know again how do you put everybody on a lane a level playing field how do you ensure that everyone regardless of where they are working can have access to high quality collaboration experiences go to the next slide we're seeing video is really becoming the key we saw over 80 percent of companies now that tell us the video is a critical technology versus nice to have we find the companies in many cases are revamping their office space to create more enclosed workspaces smaller meeting areas and and within every one of those spaces either that they want to put you know video conferencing into either all of them or most of them so more than 57 percent of participants say that they're increasing deployment of video conferencing systems into their offices again to to provide that higher quality virtual experience and there's also about 19 that are decreasing largely because they're shrinking office space as as a result of more work from home absolutely and so what are you seeing from customers how are they shifting to support this new model of hybrid work they're looking hard at what kpis and analytics can really help them set their hybrid workforce for success for instance with video looking at metrics both around user engagement such as are remote workers just as engaged on video how do they compare how do they stack up with in-office workers on video usage and participation as well as a quality of experience for those working remotely our bed is their video just performing um just as well as as users or who are in the office or is there adapter than intermediate so thinking about that end-to-end picture analytically absolutely and erwin how has the shift to remote work that we've seen over the past year changed the way that people communicate and collaborate yeah i think uh if we go to the next slide there's there's a couple of trends that we've seen the the first is the phone system while still very important and certainly increasingly important on the customer service side is not exactly as important as it was for internal enterprise communication even b2b type communication uh scenarios so in that case people are shifting to the meeting applications so where i used to you know maybe pick up a phone and call a co-worker if i had a question today maybe i i message them in our team collaboration application and if i feel like you know we really need to talk through something click on a link and we we fire up a video call and we're meeting there and then we do that you know again with for for our group meetings we do it with cus with with customers with partners suppliers so we've seen uh roughly about 27 that told us that they're seeing decline in phone system utilization as a result of meeting apps and then often for the home workers you know if they need to call somebody they've got their mobile phone sitting on their desk they just use that versus the the company's soft phone so again kind of that shift in video and mobile services becoming more important and i think underscoring what sano said about the need for kpis that allow you to you know ensure yes voice quality in the calling world is certainly important but voice and video quality in the meeting and video conferencing space and even voice quality potentially on a mobile device is is also becoming critically important and then if we go to the next slide the second area where we have seen a big trend is the team collaboration is becoming the new place where people work so it used to be you came in your office you checked your email maybe you looked at your instant messaging maybe you looked at some kpis or data coming in from other applications in a sales dashboard or marketing dashboard or whatever depending on your role we're seeing companies looking at the team space and saying you know what i can pull all of that into a team collaboration application so if i'm using microsoft teams or or any one of the competitors that are out there i can i can go into my team space and i can see data from my applications i can see calls even i may have missed i can see messages from my co-workers i can handle workflows if i have to approve something i can do all of it through that space so that again is changing the need from a management and even a security perspective to embrace that team workspace we've also seen companies seeing significant measured productivity and cost savings and revenue gain by embracing team collaboration to improve the overall effectiveness of collaboration within their organization so um we went from 28 that of the view team collaboration as a work hub and pre-pandemic 2019 over 57 percent now fantastic and speaking of these collaboration apps sony how are management needs changing to support integrated applications how do companies support multiple application environments versus a single standard app and how does it set the user base up for success so uh the the pandemic and the the spike in collaboration usage and app usage is really changing the relationship between i.t and end users so it's finding it's much less in a position to dictate standards or have um sort of centralized standards in the entire enterprise and moving much more to a model of following the user base following the lines lines of business and their needs and empowering them for success and then thinking fundamentally about a multi-vendor world a multi-vendor environment and thinking about experiences in that context so now it's not just about users teams experiences but about users teams and zoom experiences so looking at collaboration or communications experiences and meetings experiences holistically uh and having the analytics and support around that um and lastly as i tease helping make decisions going forward um it's now getting into much more of an agile stance and making platform decisions and recommendations uh for in general shorter time horizons maybe three to five years instead of ten years and planning on being agile and and repeating that that process frequently as technology evolves fantastic thank you for that insight sonu we do have a few more discussion questions here but i just want to take a moment to encourage our audience if you have any questions please feel free to submit them now we'll have a few minutes here at the end i believe to address those so feel free to get them in at this point irwin you alluded earlier to security can you tell us a little bit about how security needs are changing in this new work model yeah and i think you know a lot of this is driven by what sonic just said in terms of the speed that of it having to react now to you know new features new capabilities new uh applications coming out that employees may go and embrace on their own and what we find is that from an i.t
perspective um security is is becoming critical uh the the the not only the number of applications the companies have deployed in the last year whether those are deployed by it or users went off and got their own applications but all of the different content and capabilities that those applications have so you know a year or two ago when we had a conference call there wasn't any content associated with that but now if we're in a zoom meeting or a teams meeting or another application we've got transcripts we've got uh chat we've got uh polls perhaps we've got content that people shared into the meeting we've got applications that plug into our meeting our meeting platforms so we we're finding that organizations are really starting to to address security i talked about the budget issue earlier but only about 41 companies today have a proactive security strategy meaning they've got someone or some group that is looking at all of these issues and is figuring out what can we do to address them when we looked at our correlation by our success group this was the 85 companies i mentioned earlier that had the highest roi or productivity gain for their collaboration spend almost 66 percent of the success group had a proactive security plan that was the single biggest differentiation single biggest gap between successful companies and non-successful companies that we saw in our research was around security so what it tells you is if you have the security uh plan in place the the policies the the uh governance approach you can more effectively embrace some of these collaboration applications that provide return on investment if we go to the next slide we've seen that as companies think about um what they're they're they're leveraging or what they're they're doing to enforce policy to to be able to say you know what we want to have a consistent set of rules for whatever application we support and centrally administer those and we're seeing roughly about 21 today that are using a third party security platform obviously we've got unified squares as one of those a much larger percentage 32 percent that are planning to deploy one in in by the end of 21 and about 25 26 percent that are evaluating usually these are purchased through a cso or ciso but we're finding that either the ciso kind of delegates authority to the collaboration team to operate or they have collaboration expertise directly within that cso ciso group somebody who is a who owns security policy and works with the collaboration leaders to ensure that those are implemented effectively and if we go to the next slide i think we had one more we looked at what are organizations using these tools for and the single biggest factor is policy enforcement you know being able to set you know we want to turn off chat we want to disable guest access we want to ensure the use of a waiting room we want to uh you know set whatever kind of rules and bells and knobs and and whistles that are available to us from the collaboration applications we want to again ensure that those are consistently applied whether or not we have multiple applications or whether we have multiple instances of an application so we might have two separate you know instances of microsoft teams as an example within our organization about 66 percent of companies are using these tools to identify threats and mitigate them and and reduce the time it takes them to respond and about 32 percent are implementing data loss prevention which could entail you know we we check files before they're shared we check videos before they're shared we check whatever it could be stored in a chat space and so on so lots of different options to leverage these tools to address some of those security concerns we talked about earlier absolutely and sonu collaboration security and governance is obviously a priority for a lot of our customers how are you seeing security needs evolve what do companies care about and how are kpis evolving in this area erwin talked about some of the key security features some policy threats and dlp in what enterprises are are realizing um is a set of teams that help them operationalize all of this at enterprise scale so teams are measuring risk and kpis teams around automation and teams around being smarter through ai and ml with measuring risk um companies are are identifying kpis that that can give them a big picture handle on the level of security exposure for instance it is possible to look at all the team's activity um in an enterprise teams and channels and users and all that activity and translate all of that into a single risk score that the enterprise can then manage over time that becomes like an overall risk index kpi and once the enterprise has that kpi visible or a small set of kpis the enterprise can then automate the process of engaging with end users to manage risks so to flag risks and get user help through large-scale automation big chat bots to set the right settings on teams that created or policies they're created in a way that that really engages the user base and finally with aiml there are all kinds of opportunities to get smarter relative to traditional i.t techniques uh around managing risk and moving the needle on that risk index uh for instance the notion of smart policies where ai can figure out automatically the best policy to apply to a given team given the nature of team usage the nature of guest activity and user activity etc and can even apply natural language understanding which has really taken off in the last two or three years looking at the title of the team and the content to help identify and enforce the right policies absolutely thank you both so much for that we really appreciate the insightful discussion we do have a couple of q a questions so i'd like to go through those if you don't mind for our first one what is it most worried about when it comes to the return to office shift post covet sir i can jump in i think the the biggest one right now is they're worried about liability from potential outbreak in the office as well as you know protecting against that so uh we find that the the biggest uh investment or the biggest change people are making to their offices is ensuring isolation uh whether that's through separation of work spaces building uh plexiglas barriers i think the open office is probably dead for for the time being um signage i've even seen companies have signage they have different hallways or directional based sanitation stations that are around putting in cleaning schedules so if you are using a conference room there has to be a 30 minute break and somebody has to wipe down the tables and click on the the scheduling software to screen to say that the room has been cleaned so i think that's the the single biggest factor that people are thinking about with return of the office i'd say the second one again is you know avoiding going back to that scenario that you had before where you had the haves and have-nots you know the people who were in the office at a effective meeting and they could collaborate and they could write on the whiteboard and they could you know they could exchange ideas and the people who were remote you know maybe every so often somebody would turn to the audiophone or the conference phone and say you know hey the people who are remote you have anything to add and you know they're probably tuned out you know long long before so i think those are the two areas we've seen and i'll add one to that and that has to do with videos specifically during the pandemic enterprises are noticing a dramatic increase in video usage uh a six-fold increase per user uh is is pretty typical and so what enterprises are quite worried about is what happens when a good chunk of this user starts coming back into the office in a way that's much as much uh engage as engaged on video in the office as remul k before that cohesive experience for the two user populations uh so uh ensuring that their networks uh their enterprises are set up for that increased scale of video usage internally yeah i agree we've seen investments in network services to support anticipated growth in video so definitely okay so for our next question here what issue do you see it most frequently overlooking or choosing to ignore for the time being in terms of the future of unified communications and collaboration which might end up coming back to haunt them later on question sony you want to go first on that one sure um it's uh in in our experience uh not all enterprises are as progressive about anticipating the potentially changing needs of their user bases and lines of business would you see so with some enterprises we see an opportunity to really plan better for a multi-vendor environment and for shifting user preferences with with uc tools and modes of communication over time yeah i'd say the biggest from our standpoint is what i touch base on a little bit early which is security that companies are still uh you know the fact that only 41 percent of companies had a proactive security strategy in many cases the that security strategy is still largely voice-centric so protecting against hole fraud and sip registration attacks versus expanding the security viewpoint to figure out you know what do we need to protect against in the as far as the capabilities that these new applications deliver how do we deal with the expansion of collaboration applications into a b2b environment so we're seeing uh more than 70 percent of companies are looking at extending their team collaboration spaces to to customers partners suppliers etc um i think that that's the biggest area of risk and the one where i feel like you know again even though we we're starting to see movement in that direction that a lot of companies still don't consider collaboration security is something they are as focused on as say denial of service attacks ransomware uh data exfiltration things like that absolutely well thank you both irwin and sonu for this discussion and irwin thank you for all the insights into your recent research this has been great as we wind down here we do still need to do a couple of things first we need to announce the winner of our random drawing for the jabra speak 710 scott has done this drawing here in the background and our winner for this month is alex hill congratulations alex we'll be following up with you via email to get your shipping information but thank you for joining us and thank you to our partner jabra for providing these devices and finally we're doing something just a little different from our standard power chat webinar next month we've recently partnered with avi sbl to co-deliver user experience services that combine our best-in-class offerings to deliver a global software and managed services package that helps ensure meeting room reliability and a high quality user experience so in april we'll be releasing a joint visual podcast with avi spl unified square's vp of cloud managed services dimitri blondiel and avi spl's vp of products and solutions karen klasinski will be discussing strategies to ensure excellent meeting experiences for the hybrid workforce so both in office and for those remote participants that we've been talking about today this visual podcast will be available for on-demand viewing on our website in late april thank you again to erwin thank you so new and thank you scott for all of your work on this webinar and thank you to all of us who joined us this morning have a great rest of your day and we hope to see you at the next power chat webinar
2021-03-29