At the recently-concluded Crestron Next 2020, Andrew Gross, UC Enterprise director of sales at Crestron, asked a panel representing technology solutions integration, corporate, and education
What is your vision for the future of work in 1-2 years?
Rebeka Inoue, director of partner alliances for AVI-SPL,says the workplace will need to become more elastic.
“We’ll have users across the world who are used to having desktop phones who are now used to web-based solutions like WebEx. Companies will have to address what employees actually need to do their work when they return to their workspaces.
“We like to call it the ‘elastic digital workplace,’ where organizations will want a more seamless office; the ability to readily move between home working spaces, office spaces, huddle rooms, and other spaces.
“Organizations across the world have said they’re pretty confident that at least 30-50 percent of employees will continue to work from home at least a couple of days a week.”
Elasticity, flexbility, & hybrid capabilities were identified are the most important solutions for the workforce and education markets by each of the panelists.
The COVID Era’s effects are here to stay
Robert Basile, senior solutions architect at Corning Optical Communications, said his company has almost completely transitioned to working from home, even if telecom infrastructure is not declining.
This mirrors the roughly 50% of employees who are estimated to stay working from home — at least for part of the week — for the forseeable future.
It is no surprise that COVID numbers in the United States haven’t shown any sign of significantly decreasing, given a considerable portion of the country does not seem to follow social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines.
For Joe Way, IT director at the University of Southern California, this becomes a problem when those guidelines are supposed to be hard-cut rules for their young students to follow.
“Good luck keeping 18-22 year olds following those guidelines,” he says. “But now we can use smart monitoring technologies to ensure our spaces are as safe as possible.”
AI and voice control have therefore proven especially important in school spaces.
You might not sell technology solutions on the basis of “future-proof” anymore
Robert Basile, senior solutions architect at Corning Optical Communications, says “future-proof” isn’t the buzzword integrators should consider anymore.
Rather, it’s future-flexible.
“In our HQ, we ran fiber & power as deeply as possible, allowing us greater AV capabilities, sure, but also allowing us to prepare for IoT, occupancy sensors.
“Our space is also wireless-first; there’s no connectivity drops anywhere in the facility outside of the aggregation points. Everything is meant to be used immediately.”
“Use cases for these technologies will only continue to grow,” Basile says.
