infoTECH Feature

October 06, 2015

TechnologyAdvice Offers Tech Insight Ahead of ITEXPO

TechnologyAdvice, a popular b2b technology research/review service, provides intel on a wildly diverse set of industries. While our readers will doubtlessly appreciate their VoIP, Cloud Storage, and CRM knowledge, the company also reviews gamification, HR, accounting, and project management software (among others).

TechnologyAdvice, which boasts an impressive business research library, supplies enterprises with the data and experience necessary to make software or service decisions. Given the company’s stake in unbiased knowledge of IT services, it comes as no surprise that we found them at the Anaheim ITEXPO. We caught up with Aleks Peterson, Technology Analyst for TechnologyAdvice, ahead of the show to get his thoughts on UC, mobile devices, and the wearable tech market.

See his full interview below.  

Have we finally reached an inflection point with Unified Communications (News - Alert) adoption? What is driving or hindering the market?

I see unified communications as a collection of tools and practices that enter the workplace in small increments, so it’s hard to give a definitive report on adoption. Even so, we’re hearing a lot of stories about businesses that keep employees and customers connected through four or five different channels — as opposed to the old approach, which was basically email, fax, and office phones. I’d say unified communications is already a stated norm. At this point, adoption depends on how eager companies are to trade in their legacy systems for more modern, cloud and mobile-friendly solutions.  

One of the biggest market drivers is workforce dispersion. As more companies hire remote workers, institute work-from-home policies, and collaborate with overseas partners, having a seamless communications infrastructure will be a critical to success.

The BYOD (bring your own device) trend is another important factor. People don’t just work from their corporate laptop anymore; they use personal devices to stay productive away from the office, and they bring those devices back into the office. Smart managers see this as an opportunity to extend productivity and communication by using mobile-friendly enterprise apps.

How do you feel collaboration software/services are helping workers today?

The obvious answer is increased productivity: teams can stay connected to relevant data and updates from any location. But there are also implicit benefits to collaboration software, like the way it eliminates unnecessary meetings and archives important conversations for future access. Companies that use platforms like SharePoint, Slack, or Confluence can easily bypass communication hurdles that have plagued businesses for decades, like negotiation across time zones, control of document permissions and editing workflows, and the pitfalls of email attachments.

Has corporate awareness of security threats increased over the past year?  Have security practices been adjusted as a result?

The past year’s barrage of high-profile data breaches (Sony, BlueCross, Kaspersky, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management) has definitely had a sobering effect in most corporate circles. If the big enterprises and the U.S. government aren’t invincible, then no company is. If businesses haven’t reevaluated their security measures in the last year, they should. That means tightening password policies, building a disaster recovery plan, encrypting hardware and data transfers, and even considering a mobile device management (MDM) system.

If your mobile device had integrated software that allowed you to separate your business and personal apps, would you use it?  Why or why not?

I don’t handle a lot of sensitive corporate data on my personal device, but device partitioning or “containerization” would still be a useful feature. It would simultaneously protect my privacy and personal data, and my employer’s corporate apps. In other words, my IT department can protect their assets without controlling my entire device.

Samsung Mobile is making a direct move into the enterprise market with its latest line of corporate-centric devices.  Can Samsung successfully take the corporate market share that once belonged to BlackBerry (News - Alert) or will the enterprise mobile market remain entirely fragmented?

Any device manufacturer that can bake enterprise security features into mobile devices stands to gain some of the corporate market, and if you look around, there certainly aren’t a lot of people using Blackberries anymore. That said, I think a lot of business want to give their employees the freedom to use (or at least choose) their own phones, so they might be more inclined to consider an MDM system (which provides flexibility between carriers and operating systems) than a rigid, device-specific program.  Since there are dozens of comparable MDM vendors out there, the market will probably remain fragmented.

Will wearable tech become a major enterprise technology?  What will drive or hinder adoption?

In certain industries, wearables have already made significant inroads. In field service management, for example, field agents can use optical head-mounted displays to diagnose equipment problems, share video, identify parts, serial numbers, and barcodes, and a variety of other functions. In healthcare, wearables have become an essential tool for remote patient monitoring. A study we conducted last fall indicates there are also opportunities to use wearable tech in preventative healthcare: 57 percent of respondents said the possibility of a lower health insurance premium would make them more likely to use a fitness tracking device.

But in the broader business world, most wearables have yet to prove their unique corporate value beyond what smartphones and tablets already provide. It could be a long time before we see IT departments issuing corporate Apple (News - Alert) Watches.

What technology has had the greatest impact on your ability to perform your job in the past year?  

I serve on the marketing team at TechnologyAdvice, so a lot of the applications that make my job easier are related to agile project management and team collaboration. Two of the biggest examples are LeanKit (a web-based Kanban system which we use for automating workflows and passing projects between different stakeholders) and Slack (a messaging app that helps our team share assets and communicate in real time from various locations).

What technology has had the greatest impact on your personal life in the past year?  

It’s hard to nail it down to one, but my smartphone budgeting app comes to mind first. My wife and I use this to track expenses by category and measure our performance against a monthly goal. The app has helped us stay disciplined with our finances and save a consistent amount of money each month — which is something we couldn’t claim in the past.

What innovations do you expect to see in the business communications world in the next year?

I think we’re going to see a lot of companies moving away from on-premises servers and migrating their corporate assets to the cloud. That means increased adoption of private cloud storage, but it also means business will start hosting back-end systems through PaaS (platform as a service) providers like Amazon Web Services (News - Alert), Rackspace, and Azure. As these companies start moving business engines and productivity to the cloud, the demand for unified communications will skyrocket. And of course, that leaves room for UC vendors to develop and promote their solutions. As it stands, there aren’t a lot of vendors that truly offer UC-as-a-service, or UCaaS.

What are you looking forward to at ITEXPO (News - Alert) Anaheim?

Being able to meet with and learn alongside our partners and customers is an excellent way to spend a week in Anaheim in October.  It is always interesting to see what is next in technology and communications as we all work to stay ahead of opportunities to best serve our clients and even our own business.  As well, hearing industry leaders share keynote thoughts is very valuable for perspective.

Why should attendees come to your session/visit your booth?


Our team is focused on discussing how we can best educate, advise, and connect B2B buyers and sellers of business technology.  If an attendee is a buyer visiting our site to learn about their next software, hardware, services, or training solution; let’s chat about how our team can serve you in the process.  If an attendee is a vendor looking for their next customer who has had the right experience to best position their brand; let’s chat about how our team can help create and execute a revenue generating model for success.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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