Battling traffic and potholes to reach one’s workplace on time is an everyday ordeal for the people of Bengaluru. A majority of stress and fatigue is actually caused by the commute to work rather than actual work. Needless to say, this affects employee productivity considerably.
Partly as a reaction to this, working from home has become more acceptable in the corporate world. Companies are encouraging this trend to grapple with high office real estate costs, tired employees and tough competition to attract skilled workers. Several organisations are eagerly embracing telecommuting as a strategy to keep employees happy and costs down.
Globally, one in five employees telecommute or work-from-home on a regular basis. However, factors such as data security, real-time collaboration etc are still inhibitors for a seamless work from home experience. At Cisco, we believe that technology can enable organisations to improve collaboration that empowers people to engage and innovate—anywhere, on any device and thus enable your workforce to work-from-home or work on the go.
Imagine if you had full, secure access to all your business data, applications, and resources from anywhere, on any device, and at any time. Many small and medium-sized business (SMB) owners already do. They’ve extended their office networks to allow themselves, their colleagues, and employees to work from anywhere they happen to be.
Cisco’s collaboration offerings such as Jabber and WebEx deliver capabilities, which offer simple user experiences across devices and intelligently connect to the cloud. Tools such as WebEx allow meetings with anyone, anywhere, in real time. It combines desktop sharing through a web browser with phone conferencing and video, so everyone sees the same thing while you talk.
As the traditional corporate network perimeter continues to dissolve and the enterprise becomes more of a borderless environment, smartphones, tablets, other endpoint devices, and web applications are irreversibly changing the way people work and play online.
Cisco has embraced the “Any Device” vision, which allows for greater employee choice in devices while maintaining a common, predictable user experience that maintains or enhances global organisational competitiveness, productivity, and security.
Cisco is making significant strides toward implementing an Any Service, Any Device, Anywhere environment for organisations, and we will continue to share our experiences and lessons learned to help them circumvent the problems that may appear during the process.
The knowledge and methodology Cisco has used to transform our business and IT environments toward Any Device and beyond can be applied to other organisations large and small.
VC Gopalratnam
Vice-president, Cisco APJC
