Simplifying Remote Collaboration – in the era of hybrid work and learning, many IT pros are being asked to play a greater role in supporting remote collaboration. This blog is part of an ongoing content series that looks at different aspects of remote collaboration and innovative ways to simplify and support it.
Raul Castanon is a technology industry analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence. He recently authored a series of reports on technology and collaboration, often touching on factors related to the effect of hybrid work on IT departments.
In an episode of the Simplifying Remote Collaboration podcast, Raul shares his insights on the changing role of IT pros in the post-pandemic era of hybrid work. As companies transition to a hybrid work model, IT teams face new challenges, and Raul highlights five topics to help them manage their responsibilities and foster easy, effective and secure remote collaboration.
Following are Raul’s key points along with some suggestions on how Nureva® audio can help IT master the new challenges of hybrid work and learning.
Flexibility
Raul notes that in the hybrid era, “IT now has to deal with the uncertainty of how many people will be participating in a meeting. And will they be present in the office or remote?” And this uncertainty may also extend to the type or style of meeting being held. Boardroom style? Classroom style? Several small tables?
Raul adds, “Flexibility significantly increases the level of complexity that IT has to deal with.”
Often times, conventional pro AV audio systems do not allow IT the flexibility to quickly be ready for different meeting configurations. They may have to adjust or recalibrate each time they reconfigure a room. Compare this with Nureva audio, which features continuous autocalibration so your rooms are literally always ready. That’s a big load off an IT pro’s mind – and task list.
Scalability
This relates to the flexibility topic above with the added dimension of being able to grow your remote collaboration capabilities and environments with as much ease and as little expense as possible. Raul: “IT needs to stay up-to-date in terms of their system’s capabilities for automation and reducing the need to do on-site support. They have to centralize support as much as possible. That translates into cloud-based capabilities, for example, for monitoring AV equipment. And they need to think about the need for IT to scale their capacity to support different sites at the same time – and probably with a smaller number of people.”
Does Nureva help IT meet the challenges of scalability? Yes. First, we offer a range of systems to meet the requirements of almost any room size or configuration and an expanding feature set that gives you confidence to standardize your audio across your organization. We also offer simple device management for all Nureva products through our Nureva Console platform. And whether you have 1 system or 10,000, it’s easy to manage all your Nureva audio systems from a single secure dashboard.
The need for higher quality sound and video
This touches on the important concept of meeting equity. Raul says that in the hybrid era a vital question for IT is, “Can we provide the same level of experience to both those that are in the office and those that are participating remotely?”
Probably the most important factor in addressing this topic is audio performance. To this end, Nureva delivers a comprehensive range of advanced audio features, including
True full-room coverage – Nureva’s Microphone Mist™ technology fills a room with thousands of virtual microphones so everyone can be heard everywhere in the room. Remote team members feel like they’re in the room with their fellow team members. That’s what we mean by meeting equity.
Intelligent Sound Targeting – This groundbreaking feature limits the noise from fans and HVAC. Remote team members hear more of the sounds they want and less of the sounds they don’t.
Simultaneous processing – Microphone Mist technology listens to, and processes, all virtual microphones simultaneously. Conversations sound natural even when more than one person is speaking at the same time.
Position-based gain control – While many traditional beamforming mic systems apply gain equally to all sound sources in a given beam, Nureva’s position-based gain control identifies the exact position of each sound source in the room and applies gain to each appropriately for a more natural listening experience
Advanced echo cancellation – Calibrating echo cancellation with a traditional system is typically performed manually by a technician. Nureva audio uses continuous autocalibration to measure the acoustic environment of a room in real time for each microphone and speaker combination.
Security
It may sound surprising, but Raul tells us that “the focus at the start of the pandemic was more on business continuity, and we know that many organizations actually bypassed security and compliance, or they were forced to be more flexible.” Thankfully, organizations are reaffirming their commitments to security and compliance. One of the key ways Nureva supports security conscious organizations is by ensuring our systems use the most up-to-date security features. For example, Nureva Console, our cloud-based platform used for managing audio systems across multiple locations, is hosted on the Microsoft® Azure™ platform that features a list of advanced accreditations, including ISO/IEC 27001, 27018, GDPR and more. Nureva also leverages Okta Identity Cloud security for all identity and access management (IAM) services. Find a complete list of Nureva Console’s security features here.
Another way Nureva can help to enable better security is that the simplicity of our products frees up time for IT pros to focus on critical security concerns versus having to spend time on dealing with audio conferencing for their rooms
Doing more with less
While many organizations increased their spending on remote work technologies at the start of the hybrid era, Raul tells us that, “macroeconomic factors – including the war in Ukraine, inflation concerns, interest rates and companies going into layoff mode – could lead to a contraction in spending. What we are seeing is more careful assessment of how IT will be spending their money. In other words, they want to do more with less.” Nureva helps organizations needing to economize on at least two fronts: 1) The cost to deploy a Nureva audio system for a given room (especially mid-size and large spaces) is often a fraction of what you could spend for traditional pro AV systems. 2) Nureva has simplified everything about audio conferencing. You can install our systems yourself in less than an hour, setup is amazingly fast and simple and our management tools keep you in control with less effort – from anywhere.
As hybrid work has become the norm, IT teams will continue to play a critical role in supporting remote collaboration. By following these five tips, IT pros can simplify their work and help their companies thrive in the post-pandemic era.
Systems designed for hybrid
With Nureva you get great audio – including full-room mic coverage – from systems that are easy to install, automatically adapt to changing meeting configurations and can be managed with ease from anywhere.
Posted on Mar 22, 2023 6:00:00 AM
