With the SARS-Cov-2 virus still raging the world, we’re living the biggest experiment ever. Out of fear for record death counts caused by this new and unknown enemy, all around the world countries have gone in some form of lockdown, effectively halting large parts of our global economy. Overloaded healthcare systems are struggling to cope, “non-essential” industries like hospitality, leisure, personal care and arts are on life support, and events are cancelled. Social distancing has become the new normal in just weeks.
While internet and cloud already made “work anywhere, anytime, on any device” possible, these past weeks we are witnessing an order of magnitude growth of remote working, videoconferencing, online education and telehealth. The infrastructure and tools have existed for a while and are now scaling up dramatically (some platforms are seeing usage exploding x30) and being further improved and secured. And in some countries, like The Netherlands with its excellent digital infrastructure and high degree of remote work to start with, this experiment seems to be working out rather well and we’re starting to see Digital Acceleration in action.
Predicting the future is as hard as ever but with this lockdown expected to continue for quite some time in large parts of the world it seems likely this will lead to lasting changes in the ways we work and live. A new era where work will be much more distributed and “online” will become even more important, not just for knowledge workers but in many more areas of our lives.
Welcome to the era of smart communications, where people come first.
About the author
Over the past 30 years Rob (co-)founded various tech companies, including one of the leading Dutch hosted voice providers (before hosted voice became the new normal). Today, he works with telcos/CSPs and some of the world’s leading technology providers on innovation and growth, especially in the rapidly changing world of cloud communications and CPaaS. Rob has this crazy belief that the strengths of corporates and innovators should be combined in new ecosystems to create optimal customer experience, new business models and solutions for some of today’s big problems.
