The Social Progress Index (SPI) is an algorithm of sorts devised by The Social Progress Imperative which offers a framework for measuring the facets of social progress for each country in part. The 2015 edition improves on last year’s version through plentiful feedback and an expanded number of countries. A total of 52 indicators were used in the study. A very important takeaway from the study – it tells you where there’s room for business.
Search Results for: Communications
Photo by Paul Shore on Unsplash
VoIP has been around for decades, yet most SMBs (small and midsize businesses) are way behind the technology curve when it comes to business phone systems. If your job is to sell PBX services, this is probably the best piece of news you’ve heard this year.
Next-generation communications are getting more versatile by the day. While this is awesome for the industry, it’s also in conflict with SMBs’ views. The more advanced the features, the more intimidated they seem to be to give them a try.
Good team work yields positive results in any type of organization, but it’s easier said than done, unfortunately. While technology lets us do pretty much anything these days, we often fail to make proper use of the ingeniously-crafted tools around us.
One such example is team collaboration and the solutions design to assist this process. More often than not they fail to spur productivity when implemented without notice or training, and worse still – before any research has been done about the company’s actual need for these tools. This was the key finding in a study conducted by Softchoice on firms where the managers failed to understand unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools.
The poll was carried out on 250 IT managers and 750 line-of-business employees to determine the impact of typical UC and collaboration rollouts on employee habits, preferences and overall satisfaction at the workplace. One of the first things the survey managed to uncover was that many IT managers are actually hesitant to invest in new collaboration technology because, as they put it, the ones they already have implemented are not being used.
Touchdown!
Greetings from Europa Park in Rust, Germany. We can’t wait to lift the cloth off our newborn baby – Hubgets – an awesome new collaboration platform that promises to forever change the way we work. Only a few more hours ’till the keynote!
Booth D01 is our temporary home at WHD and we’re available to discuss the latest technology we’ve come up with to help businesses grow. Visitors are currently getting a hands-on with Hubgets. Here’s why we’re so excited about it!
Photo by Kirill Balobanov on Unsplash
Despite appearing to gain momentum, global enterprise telephony and Unified Communications (UC) taken as a whole lost four points last year, with the market closing at an estimated $8.7 billion valuation. The sub-par results are attributed to reluctance from business owners to ditch their aging PBX equipment which, ironically, causes more headaches than benefits.
The largest international computer expo in the world, bigger even than China’s COMPUTEX, CeBIT today officially kicked off a new edition featuring an awe-inspiring introduction signed Angela Merkel and Jack Ma.
The event’s organizers were proud to report today that the 2,800 tickets available for the opening ceremony were sold out in record time – hardly a surprise, considering who took the stage to make this year’s introduction.
Establishing a business today is no picnic. The space is highly competitive, and you need to get a few kinks out of the way before you make your first sale. One of those is communication. If you want to survive and / or grow, you cannot risk not getting this one right.
Imagine trying to pitch your latest and greatest to a packed audience without a microphone in your hand. Much in the same way, your office needs the communication aspect cleared out before anything else. If clients can’t get your message in a timely fashion, you’re already spiraling down to failure.
Surely you’ve heard of Alibaba Group, the Chinese e-commerce and payment service catering to 300 million users in their home land, and plenty of other clients internationally. Their slogan is “Global trade starts here,” but soon they might have to update it to “everywhere,” if their latest developments are any indication.
This week, Alibaba launched its first U.S.-based cloud computing hub confirming its plans to pit itself against already-established giants like Amazon and Google. The reason? Alibaba knows it’s imperative to align their operations with strategically placed facilities when the doors to global business are wide open.
Workers today have more communication tools to choose from than ever. That includes Unified Communications, which integrates voice, video, instant messaging, conferencing, faxing, and more – all on one platform. However, employees often receive little or no training to reap the benefits of using these innovative tools. Many organizations end up removing training from their budgets when making such large technology shifts – believing that people should inherently know how to use and why they should use these tools. But this decision to remove training and consulting can be a costly choice for enterprises, as the technology won’t be used to its fullest potential. This could increase the total implementation cost ten folds.
Now that 2015 has just started, it’s the perfect time to reflect on how Unified Communications evolved in 2014. And, as our co-founder put it, there are a lot of things to look back and even more to look for in the new year.
Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash
