While it hardly seems like a full year has passed, Compunetix, a founding member of the IMCCA, was proud to help sponsor and attend the second annual Collaboration Week New York conference held last week (Feb 27-29). #CWNY20
This event, launched last year by IMCCA board members Carol Zelkin, David Danto and Dr. S. Ann Earon, brings together collaboration experts, corporate C-level executives, industry manufacturers and solution integrators to assess and discuss the current state of meeting technologies. This unique event forgoes the traditional centralized conference venue for a much more dynamic and thought-provoking series of separate sessions held across Manhattan and showcasing the spaces and collaboration technologies being deployed across the world’s leading workplaces.
The Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance (IMCCA) is the leading industry not-for-profit dedicated to supporting and educating collaborative end-users on the electronic toolkits that power today’s meetings. The association, which Compunetix helped establish over 20 years ago, provides an important bridge connecting collaborative organizations with industry vendors to encourage discussion, development and direction. Membership to IMCCA is free for all end-users and we strongly encourage you to investigate membership HERE.
The 2020 version of Collaboration Week offered deep dives into matters impacting end-users and organizations alike. Day 1 corporate hosts Blackrock and Poly featured speakers, tours and panel sessions on subjects such as the state of the industry, collaboration metrics, the new generation of endpoints and the fluidity of service providers. Day 2 started with a visit to the Google facility where we reviewed the current state of cloud services, followed by an afternoon at Gateway envisioning the next generation of collaborative technology trends.
“It’s always informative to go on-site to see how our technologies are being deployed, and to discuss the organizational and physical impact those technologies have on the knowledge worker of tomorrow. The IMCCA has crafted a unique and important new event for all stakeholders in the industry,” explained Robert Haley, Compunetix Director of Marketing and event attendee.
The IMCCA hosted a Gala industry dinner on Tuesday evening where they announced, awarded and celebrated the 2020 recipients of the Association’s Emerging Technology Fellow (ETF) Awards – Crestron’s Randy Klein and Zoom’s Eric S. Yuan.
The sessions picked up again Wednesday morning where Planar hosted attendees through two exciting back and forth discussions. The first was a presentation by Mark Peterson of Shen, Milsom and Wilke involving the ‘new worker’ and evolving workplace. The second portion delved into the perspectives of Gen Z and Millennials workers, the relationships with technology and their expectations in regard to collaborative connectivity. A final panel discussion investigated the impact of team-based software collaboration packages and their impact across large organizations.
According to David Danto, Director of Emerging Technologies at the IMCCA, three big takeaways from the week include: Unified Communications Isn’t Unified, Work Habits are Shifting and Workplaces Are Evolving Intelligently. You can read David’s full debrief at the AVNetwork website HERE.