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No Jitter Focus: Answering the Tough UC Questions

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To give perspective to the timely topics impacting enterprise IT, No Jitter and Enterprise Connect have launched a video series called No Jitter Focus. In each video, Eric Krapf, GM and program co-chair for Enterprise Connect, sits down with either Beth Schultz, No Jitter editor and EC program co-chair, or a leading analyst, consultant, or expert to share their thoughts on what’s hot, and why. The first three videos, which are available to watch on the Enterprise Connect YouTube channel, feature a frequent No Jitter contributor expounding on one of their recent articles.
 
In the most recent No Jitter Focus video, Irwin Lazar, VP and service director at Nemertes Research, shared some further perspective from his No Jitter article “What are the Top 5 IT Concerns for 2021?” During the conversation, Lazar discusses how IT professionals are preparing for the new year and highlighted two things specifically:
  1. Return to office strategy — Enterprises will be looking at ways of getting back to the office safely and how to configure their workspace to ensure that safety measures are being followed and that contract tracing is possible.
  2. Applications — Enterprises are now looking to optimize the virtual work environment with additional apps, including virtual whiteboards, project and task management software, and sentiment analytics to track employee engagement and behavior.
Click on the player below for more of Lazar’s insight.
 
In another Focus video, we explore an application that has seen record-level of adoption during the pandemic: video conferencing. Everyone is looking for a piece of the video pie, including startups and legacy technology vendors — including graphics processor unit provider Nvidia. As Zeus Kerravala, analyst at ZK Research, explained in a No Jitter post last month, Nvidia has launched its Maxine platform, a set of AI collaboration services that can be streamed from the cloud. In his Focus conversation, Kerravala went on to explain that video vendors can use the Maxine service for capabilities like bandwidth efficiency, face alignment, and custom avatars instead of needing to build them outright.
 
Click on the player below for more details from Kerravala.
 
While some technology vendors are looking to get deeper into the collaboration space, might it be time for a legacy provider, Cisco, to get out of it entirely? Brent Kelly, president and principal analyst at KelCor, suggested such in a recent post, noting market factors, including heavy competition from vendors like Zoom, and other considerations, such as executive turnover, as potential signals that this might be a good time for Cisco to sell off or spin out its collaboration business unit.
 
Click on the player below for more details from Kelly.
 
As our No Jitter Focus conversations make clear, the UC/collaboration industry is evolving faster than ever. Tune in to these and others for more insight on the hottest topics of the week, and how they might affect your future plans.