UC Advanced - issue #21

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When Worlds Collide As the worlds of audiovisual and UC draw ever closer, UC Advanced asked Mark Glasspool, senior director, UK and Ireland, and Nick Stancliffe, collaboration and UC lead at TD SYNNEX Maverick, to share their insights and views on the current state of play in the sectors, and where it’s all heading? Q AV and UC – converging or keeping their distance? solution and the environment to suit the different needs of the users.

Mark: And what you want is for the telephony, call routing, chat, and that ideation and interaction to happen on a single platform – or for all the different solutions and platforms you want to use to work seamlessly together. That’s when it becomes a really good user experience.

Nick: We’re seeing a growing number of companies reassess their hybrid working strategies, focusing on how to strike the right balance between productivity and remote work. Increasingly, the emphasis is shifting toward encouraging greater office attendance. As a result, there’s a stronger focus on deploying the right AV and UC technologies, which are widely recognised as key enablers from a user experience perspective. And it’s not just about the meeting room. Digital signage is also being used throughout the workplace to help reinforce culture and foster a sense of connection. Mark: UC and collaboration are not yet in one place, but there is a continued convergence and that’s primarily being driven by platforms, which have evolved dramatically over the last three or four years and have now become all- encompassing. If you are serious about collaboration today, you need to start getting serious about UC and vice-versa. Q What’s driving them together? Nick: It’s about being able to provide the right kind of experience for the context. The environment needs to be set up so that they can have ideation- style brainstorming meetings with a collaboration touch device, or for more formalised meetings in a larger boardroom, or ad-hoc meetings in a small huddle space. It is about designing the

Mark Glasspool senior director, UK and Ireland

tdsynnex.com

Increasingly, the emphasis is shifting toward encouraging greater office attendance. As a result, there's a stronger focus on deploying the right AV and UC technologies...

Q Will we see integration between vendors?

Mark: We’re already offering a variety of bundled offerings because we see the need for that. People are looking at what their meeting room looks like, what their corporate signage looks like, what the LED wall in reception looks like, and that’s not only about the hardware, it’s about the content and how it all works together. That’s almost always going to involve a combination of products from different vendors.