Before 2020 a movement was brewing within many organizations. The question often came up: ‘does work really need an office?” We got our answer during the pandemic that accelerated a rise in remote workforce. Employers started to accept that work from anywhere has notable gains, wherein companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize global talent and experience productivity gains, while workers can enjoy geographic flexibility. Of course the key here is, leveraging the right communication and collaboration tools to reap the benefit of remote work. In an exclusive interaction with CXOToday, Rahul Sharma, Managing Director for India & SAARC region of LogMeIn, a public SaaS company, with a focus on communication and collaboration, explains the key trends in video and other collaboration tools and how the company is helping businesses to work-from-anywhere with its enterprise collaboration solutions.
CXOToday: Can you highlight some of the trends in video collaboration in the recent months?
Rahul Sharma: Many companies where already leveraging collaboration tools as part of their digital transformation journeys much before the Covid-19 hit last year. In fact, the pandemic occurred at a point in history when the technology required to work remotely already existed. Only it spurred the video communication and collaboration trends with the restrictions on physical movement during the lockdown, making remote working the ‘new normal’. While there were initial struggles to adapt to this way of working, eventually, they embraced the digital intervention to substitute the physical modes of engagement. Although unified communication and collaboration technology emerged out of necessity, the rising adoption of video collaboration platforms since the viral outbreak is not surprising at all, as it allows companies to conduct business as usual.
According to 451 Research, nearly 64% of businesses have enforced expanded and long-term remote work policies, while 35% of them are rethinking their longer-term workforce technology strategies. Against this backdrop, we are committed to unlocking the next levels of development in the remote working landscape. To achieve this, we will continue to upgrade our offerings and make them more robust, scalable, and efficient for our customers, even those living in regions with low internet connectivity.
CXOToday: Companies are mostly worried about data breaches. How are companies like LogMeIn addressing security concerns in video conferencing?
Rahul Sharma: Three key reasons are at the center of why users opt for any solutions that includes, it is easy to use, it’s scalable, and it is highly secured. Our work from anywhere solutions have received an enthusiastic response from our users. We take great care in ensuring that our solutions do not carry any loopholes that might endanger the security or privacy of our users. Apart from regularly rescanning all our products for vulnerability, our security team combines standards-based cryptography and an intuitive UI to maintain high confidentiality and integrity. For example, to deal with the surge in remote working, we have extra vCPU for increased memory and network capacity with no point of failure in location.
Our collaboration products such as GoToMeeting ensure that all information, chats, and sessions stay confidential and secure with TLS encryption and encryption at rest using 256-bit AES for session cloud recordings. Users are given full control over their experience and data by features like secure content sharing, lock and password protected meetings, and flexibility over meeting recordings, chats, etc. This all results of this unwavering commitment to ensuring robust security.
CXOToday: How is LogMeIn helping companies in crafting effective and secure work-from-home policies?
Rahul Sharma: Our goal is to empower organizations to work from anywhere. In line with this mission, we deliver strategic counsel to our users through various collaboration products like GoToConnect, GoToWebinar, GoToRoom, GoToTraining and GoToMeeting to make it easy for enterprises to connect professionally and efficiently across the globe.
To cater to our diverse employee base, for instance, LogMeIn has developed “remote-centric personas.” They are identifiers representing the working arrangement, details, and logistics of each employee. We also plan to reduce the time spent in our office and utilize the physical space more judiciously – for get-togethers and other “off-site” activities, face-to-face collaboration, meetings, etc., rather than working there five days a week.
Further, LogMeIn’s online community site seeks to provide all the extra help, strategic guidance, and answers to queries regarding our products.Members can access the site any time of the day and resolve their minor queries or connect with our service professionals for queries that are more serious or urgent in nature.
CXOToday: Are you tapping the SMB segment too with your suite of products? If yes, how?
Rahul Sharma: Our SaaS-based platform offers a suite of remote access and collaboration solutions to enterprises of all sizes. Our product portfolio consists of solutions such as GoToWebinar, GoToMeeting, Bold360, and Rescue, among others. LogMeIn solutions are currently used by more than two million businesses in over 190 countries around the world. They offer a suite of scalable products that allow SMBs to expand the application of our products at the point they need them with quick deployment and applications designed to meet their business needs.
We are helping SMB and SMEs make digital transformations, especially those located in tier-2 and tier-3 regions. Tier-2 regions are the next level down from tier -1 and are smaller cities with a population of one million. Tier-3 cities are ones which are just beginning to see technological advancements and has a population of less than a million.We are focused on reaching out to such businesses because many of them are not familiar with our products. While they know the benefits of taking their business online, they may not be aware of how to begin on that journey. This is where we are stepping in, to handhold such small businesses throughout their digital transformation journey. Many of our products offer a range of one-on-one, group, or on-demand learning and training and all of our products are built to be simple, intuitive, and reliable, so it’s easy to get up and running in real-time.
CXOToday: What is the roadmap of the company in 2021?
Rahul Sharma: In terms of our business roadmap, we plan to continue building and improving our portfolio of best-in-class tech-led solutions to consolidate the viability of the new Work-From-Anywhere era, as we believe the trend of remote working is only going to continue, even beyond the pandemic.
We are also focusing on sustainability because we understand the tremendous positive impact remote working has had on the environment. Reduced emissions have resulted in increasingly better air quality everywhere. In 2021, we would like to explore opportunities to participate in new renewable energy efforts by striving to procure renewable energy certificates (RECs) and hence, we plan to reach Net Zero by 2030. By the first half of 2021, we also aim to complete an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) materiality assessment which will help us understand which ESG issue should be prioritized by us as a company.
Lastly, as part of our CSR, we will continue to invest in non-profit organizations working towards a greener future. Hopefully, all our sustainability efforts will help to reduce our carbon footprint and create a better future for our employees – which is our ultimate goal.
