John Macario, Senior VP Enterprise and Channel Marketing at Ribbon, had seen the directional trends in UC adoption from way back, along with the steady growth of cloud adoption and location-independent working.
But for lots of organisations, sheer inertia got in the way — because it’s always easier NOT to make a wholesale change to the way you do things, at least when the pain of continuing is not increasing too sharply.
Of course, the events of spring 2020 had many impacts, among them the transition to remote work. “Our colleague Greg Zwieg is fond of saying that in April 2020 IT directors woke up and realised they had millions of users trained on collaboration platforms overnight,” Macario explained.
This meant overcoming at a stroke one of the biggest objections people had always had about deploying Microsoft Teams, which was training users — a recent survey from Ribbon Communications found that more than a quarter of users across all company sizes got stuck at this juncture, with the friction it created. Unfamiliar software, especially for communication and collaboration, is a killer of both productivity and motivation — so it’s understandable that many enterprises are reluctant to make a wholesale switchover when they don’t have to.
What the business world proved in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, however, was just how resilient it could be, and how quickly people COULD learn and adapt when they had to — not just to new software, but new situations for working and getting things done, in entirely different circumstances.
The same survey showed, unsurprisingly, a dramatic shift in numbers working remotely pre- and post-pandemic. But most interestingly, there was a roughly one-third increase (over previous data from April 2019) across companies of all sizes, indicating that more than 25% of their workforce will be remote in the future.
Microsoft Teams has since become a household name, and even our children are effectively trained on it, in their virtual classrooms — so we won’t be rolling the clock back any time soon. The chasm has been crossed for good.
The Ribbon business development team within Macario’s organisation ran some numbers in October 2020 to assess this, and “lead qualifiers, who wanted to understand the kinds of opportunities we’re driving here, established that about 75 percent of the conversations they qualify on a monthly basis are related to Microsoft Teams and other kinds of ‘standard’ UC, but it’s overwhelming how often they’re speaking to a prospect about Teams".
