Multiple Avenues of Collaboration in the New Year 2013

 The business marketplace has always been a dynamic entity, in which time-tested methods become ever-more streamlined and altogether new ones take the stage. This inevitable evolution and inception of key trends – sometimes from historically disparate avenues – usually work in tandem to bring platforms together, with the all-important common goals of saving time, making money and increasing reach. Consider this handful of trends that are poised to make their contribution in 2013.

• Hosted Services and the SaaS Revolution: Probably the single most important trend is the migration of services to the cloud. Software-as-a-service has everything going for it; from the benefits of paying per user per month, ease of implementation without any hardware concerns, and quick deployment.

• Extending the Workplace to the Home with BYOD: The Bring-Your-Own-Device trend is qualitatively similar to the cloud migration of so many services. Company overhead is drastically reduced by having employees use their own personalized, powerful and already-configured (no need for classroom instruction) mobile devices to engage in real-time collaborations and off-hours work.

• More Technology Means More Connectivity: This rings so much more true with the multiple options for online liaisons between companies. Geographical limitations will be all but banished in 2013, without unduly increasing risk (cloud security gets better every day) as a tradeoff for revenue growth and cost reduction.

• Bridging Verticals through Ease-of-Transfer: The general theme has been one of collaboration, and vertical specialization is heavily reliant on this paradigm. There have always been too many business limitations with trying to transfer files via FTP clients and email, which has been solved by the likes of DropBox, Google Drive and many other file management and transfer applications. Companies are already seeing the drastic benefits of the newfound ability to place entire presentations – videos and all – in this spacious medium.

Although there are several contributors that will drive collaboration forward in 2013, the biggest layer is undoubtedly the cloud. It plays a part in each of the avenues to a more streamlined and lucrative tomorrow, by putting the relevant tools at the fingertips of the enterprise, faster and with more breadth than ever before. The cloud and the extremes of collaboration made possible by the services it supports maximize consistency, flexibility, availability, collaboration options and capacity, and sheer data – into 2013 and well beyond.