Two of the most disruptive changes afoot in the technology landscape today are cloud and mobility. Both of them are omnipresent, all pervasive, and heavily abused. A few special commonalities between the two are noteworthy. Firstly, both are having a significant impact on both the consumer and the enterprise segments. Secondly, they both are increasingly becoming interdependent on the services provided by each other.
The confluence of these two steams of technology advancement is creating an ocean of possibilities for the users. These opportunities are being leveraged by businesses worldwide for creating offerings around them, or leveraging them for the furtherance of their respective corporate agendas. This has been made possible by some inter-usable features of cloud and mobility.
Cloud is essentially time-share
For those of you who went to work in the 80s would remember the time-share machines, which were too expensive (also, too big) to own, and therefore, were leased out for quanta of time. Today, the computers have shrunk in size and cost considerably, with a lot of processing power. However, the workloads have also increased manifold.
When it comes to smart devices, it is not possible to store all the data that is required for your usage on the same device. Just think if you needed to store all the pictures and videos you have ever taken on your smartphone. 64 Gigs will start to look very small very soon. But what about the time when you want to show your friends the antics of your 2-year-old daughter? It then becomes imperative to call upon the prowess of the global time-share – The Cloud. You can store your data on the cloud, and access it whenever, wherever you need it.
Enterprises use this a lot for the people who need to be out in the field, where the action is. There is not enough bandwidth in the world to store local copies of corporate data on each individual device (if you can fit it there), and keep each and every one of them synced real-time. That’s where the Ether is the perfect choice.
Wireless networks are faster than ever
We have 3 options when deploying applications and data – we do it locally, or over a computer network (which is still local to the network), or we do it in the Ether (C-word). Earlier, the third mechanism was not preferred because of accessibility issues caused by slow networks and inadequate bandwidth. Today, with the evolution of 4G LTE, the wireless networks are far faster and reliable than the broadband from 2 years ago. This solves the connectivity conundrum, allowing the users to enjoy the benefits of using the benefits of the cloud on their mobile devices.
Communication and collaboration
The most important currency in today’s world is information. Organizations are fixated on the information that is generated, manipulated, stored and used by the users (both customers and employees) on a day-to-day basis. Enterprise unified communication and collaboration (UCC) platforms integrate different sources of this information into a single, cross-leveraged unit. However, when we talk about mobile UCC, there are many interoperability challenges. Some of these challenges have been addressed in the PaaS and SaaS world where the APIs, connectors and native integrations are readily available.
The evolution of mobility and cloud certainly present many possibilities for new services and improvement of existing offerings. If used wisely, they can lead to a solid topline and bottomline impact.
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