Apr 2, 2012

Asia - The end of the office cubicle


Technology is shrinking the world, and changing how we work

The workplace across Asia is evolving. There are major technological and demographic transitions occurring today that are fundamentally changing the way we communicate, work and collaborate across the globe.

Taken individually, each one of these trends by itself is very powerful. Taken together, what we see is transformational. We are witnessing the end of the dominance of the PC era and a shift to a post-PC world.

What do these changes look like?

Mobile devices

The impact of the growth of mobile devices cannot be understated.

New smartphones and tablets based on Android, Windows Phone and iOS are growing at phenomenal rates. As people bring their own devices to work and expect to connect to the corporate network, we predict this bring your own device trend to mushroom.

Social Networks

The consumerisation of enterprise IT has driven not only the uptake of different devices but also fuelled social media growth. We are seeing the proliferation of social media applications in organisations of every size, across every part of Asia.

Live Video

Video is having a profound impact on the way we do business in today's digitally connected world.

It is no longer just used in conferencing and training, but in areas such as remote healthcare and banking, live problem resolution in manufacturing, global interviewing in HR, virtual receptionists, and many others.

According to the 2011 Interactive Media Studies Enterprise Web Communications Survey, done by research company Interactive Media Strategies (IMS), one-third of all corporations say they are using videos at least once a week.

The survey took into consideration the use, deployment and perceptions of a wide range of Web communications technologies, including online video, mobile video, social media, rich media, Web conferencing and instant messaging, of 1,002 corporate executives.

Virtual office

As more businesses look to host their employees' desktops on a remote central server, instead of on the local storage of a remote client, the demand for hosted virtual desktops is set to explode.

According to market research company Gartner, the worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013 to reach 49 million units, up from more than 500,000 units in 2009.

Combine these changes together and we step into a new world. One where the PC loses its role within enterprise and where any device becomes a business device.

The end of PC

Welcome to the Post-PC Era. In the past, PCs dominated, and work was done at the office. Today, enterprises exist without boundaries and the personal and the professional life have merged.

This year will be the start of the demise of the PC within organisations across Asia. We will see desks getting less cluttered, employees using a wealth of different devices and the rise of the virtualised desktop.

The IT department of 2012 will support the myriad devices, operating systems and architectures that employees chose to work with. And it is not only their employees that will be harnessing a holistic mix of applications and devices.

Customers, partners and suppliers too will all be changing the way that they work.

As the desktop PC becomes far less relevant, its place will be taken by the hosted virtual workstation, sitting right at the heart of the new workplace and challenging the very paradigm of the traditional PC.

The hosted virtual workstation is a game changer for the entire industry and businesses will make a significant shift from traditional desktops towards virtual workspaces.

In fact, Gartner expects the hosted virtual desktop environment to rise to 70 million units by 2014.

Currently, hosted virtual environments cater mainly to data applications, not rich interactive media, mobile devices, real time and video applications. This is set to change as the use of video becomes ever more prevalent.

The rise of video

The Cisco Visual Networking Index found that Internet video is expected to increase from 40 per cent to 62 per cent of all Internet traffic by the end of 2015.

This is a significant upsurge and as more businesses move to hosted virtual environments, they will expect their workstation to be able to support the everyday applications and services that they use. A collaborative, interactive work environment will become the norm.

And that is where we expect to be this year. More businesses across the region will enable their employees to complete work anywhere across the globe, via any device and platform, and communicate via new applications that are people and social centric.

According to a report by market analyst IDC done last year, Asia will see the biggest increase in mobile workers over the next two years.

By next year, 1.2 billion people - one-third of the world's total work force - will be mobile workers, and 62 per cent of them will be based in Asia.

Desktop computing is changing and, in today's ever mobile society collaboration has never been as important.

Dinesh Malkani
todayonline.com



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