Collaboration Clouds

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” – Michael Jordan, arguably the greatest basketball player ever.

For those who follow basketball, Michael Jordan needs no introduction. For the rest, here are the basic facts. Jordan holds the NBA (National Basketball Association) records for highest career regular season scoring average (30.12 points per game) and highest career playoff scoring average (33.45 points per game). In 1999, he was named the greatest North American athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. His biography on the National NBA website states, “By acclamation, Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player of all time.”

Now, what has this got to do with cloud computing?

The point I’m trying to make here is that even an exceptional individual performer like Jordan realizes the importance of collaboration, and this is a benefit of cloud computing that is often ignored among all the platitudes regarding cost savings, disaster recovery and scalability. Now, there’s no denying the importance of all these cloud attributes, but one cannot understate the business value that collaboration on the cloud can bring to the table.

Think about it. Through collaboration on the cloud, a business can leverage the joint competencies of multiple people at the same time without having to deal with troublesome knowledge transfers required by legacy IT. Thus instead of mailing files back and forth with updates that are difficult to track, several people can work on the same file at the same time if they are on the cloud. Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg of potential benefits that cloud collaboration can reveal, and Avaya is looking to bring them forth as the logical next step to cloud computing.

Recognizing the need for packaging collaboration on the cloud as a complete business solution, Avaya has introduced the concept of the collaboration cloud, an environment where participants can effectively build, deliver, use and enhance communications using cloud-based technologies. Combining the best that IaaS, PaaS and SaaS have to offer, Avaya is looking to offer CaaS or Collaboration as a Service. Considering the widespread business benefits that such a service can bring to organizations in terms of improved productivity, its success seems guaranteed.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya.

By Sourya Biswas