Who moved your cheese? Do you know? If you’ve been in this space for a while, you’ve noticed that your business model is changing. Margins are moving out of hardware and into services. New competitors are entering the market (and sometimes deciding to stay). A constant dose of fear from pundits about how disruption will put you out of business in “X” number of months.
Once you digest it all, you realize:
- Business models have changed. This isn’t new.
- Things are changing faster. This is hard.
- The pundits aren’t necessarily right, but that is up to you.
If you didn’t make these observations right away, that’s okay. But if you read them and found yourself nodding accordingly, that’s because, sometimes, acknowledging and acting on the obvious is the best way to overcome immediate hurdles.
The second key to overcoming these hurdles: foresight. It’s the uncanny ability to see what’s coming next and which areas you need to be focused on if you want to get and stay ahead. In AV, I boil it down to one thing: collaboration.
Integrators need to get on the collaboration bandwagon. This isn’t about videoconferencing, unified communications, instant messaging, WebEx, or any other tool. This is a fundamental way of thinking about what you’re doing for your customers or, perhaps better said, “How are you solving the No. 1 issue in the future for your customers?” It comes down to the convergence of endless vehicles for communication plus the immediate/impending inclusion of machines as part of our communications channels.
The new formula for collaboration looks something like this:
Communication Channels + Contacts + Chatbots and Machines + Mobility + Bandwidth = Collaboration
It’s a long formula, but this reflects all areas that integrators are going to need to address. Broken down, it includes the following …
Communication Channels
This can include social media, email, text message, voice, and video. Any way that we can be connected is a communications channel – and we need to bring all of these channels these together.
Contacts
Inclusiveness is key. Too many systems are closed, and they make it hard to connect to those outside of the system. That’s taboo and problematic given that Google, Facebook, and others make anyone, anywhere simple to access.
Chatbots and Machines
This one is new, but we already see in systems like Cisco Spark that companies like CloudFuze and Cisco bring bots into our messaging stream and supporting them will be even more critical in the near future.
Mobility
Mobility includes any device anywhere – or it isn’t good enough. This includes everything from sophisticated room installations all the way down to mobile devices and desktops.
Bandwidth
We need the right connectivity – WiFi, LTE, and soon 5G – as a way to make sure the communications are seamless.
If we put these things together and take limitations off the table, this equates to what the future of collaboration should look like.
For integrators, being able to deliver on all of these items is what will allow you to stay competitive in this space. Otherwise, software and IT companies will simply minimize the value of the AV provider. Harsh? Perhaps, but that doesn’t make it any less true.
The bottom line: The cheese is not being moved. It is moving continuously. If collaboration, and becoming a true partner in connecting everyone to everything, isn’t part of your view of collaboration, then you are just selling videoconferencing.
Integrators are well positioned to truly bring collaboration to life. Now you just have to choose to accept that opportunity and turn it into a revenue and customer satisfaction machine. –Dan Newman, Cofounder of V3*Broadsuite