Rajiv Bhalla
Managing Director - Barco India

2020 – THE YEAR OF HYBRID WORKSPACES  
Covid-19 has altered existing enterprise workspace models. Companies must optimally use technology and space to drive productivity and interoperability in the hybrid workplace. Barco’s technology is enhancing workplace agility and efficiency, ensuring enterprises are primed for the new normal. It is consistently striving to ensure productivity and continuity for its discerning consumers and has chalked out its R&D and marketing strategies accordingly. Barco strives to think with its customers, understand their pain points and works towards solving their problems, thereby enabling bright outcomes. In 2020-2021, it is focusing on these principles even as it introduces new, cutting-edge remote and hybrid work technology in the segments it caters to.  

With the Covid pandemic accelerating the adoption of digital transformation, across industries, enterprises now need to enhance business resilience by preparing for future, hybrid workplaces that are powered by mobile connectivity, cognitive tools, and new-age technology solutions. For 2020, Barco’s key priority is enabling remote and hybrid workspaces through solutions across verticals such as Meeting Experience, Operator Experience, Events, and Healthcare and we have launched new solutions to support these industries.

Barco has been uniquely positioned to cater to the demand for seamless collaboration with its hybrid conferencing solution Barco ClickShare and recently extended the ClickShare series with ClickShare Conference, a unique wireless conferencing system that provides secure solutions for closer collaboration and an immersive conferencing experience, enabling enterprises to embrace Bring Your Own Device and Bring Your Own Meeting in the workplace. 

Another technology enabling hybrid workspace is Barco SecureStream, a media streaming solution that makes sharing content from the control room to external stakeholders easy and secure. From the overview of available sources, control room operators can simply drag and drop content into a SecureStream channel and then provide the needed link to the receivers. 

Remote and hybrid learning has also become a necessity with Covid-19.Barco weConnect, a virtual classroom software that is dedicated specifically to distance learning in real-time, without giving up on class engagement and contact between teacher and student, is an excellent fit for academic purposes. 

In the healthcare vertical, telemedicine and teleradiology have gained prominence as people opted for online consultations while maintaining social distancing. Doctors and radiologists offered online services to support patients from remote locations. Now more than ever, radiologists are faced with many challenges. They have more and more cases to handle, which are also becoming ever more complex. In such precarious situations, Barco’s medical-grade displays have been ensuring increased efficiency for the practitioners and Barco’s extensive line-up of high precision, disinfectable displays provide accuracy, efficiency, and safety, ably supporting radiology, teleradiology, remote reading, and excellent diagnosis. 

CONSUMER OUTREACH A DIFFERENTIATOR 
The pandemic has boosted the demand for Barco’s innovative solutions across verticals such as Meeting Experience, Operator Experience, and Healthcare and, as a result, it has launched several new solutions to support these industries.  

Barco has always believed in integrity and a customer-first attitude while ensuring excellent outcomes and services for its consumers. Its marketing strategy for the year revolves around four broad objectives – ensuring business sustainability through hybrid solutions for consumers, building a high-performance team, fuelling Barco’s growth through customer-centricity, and readying itself for the digital future. From a marketing perspective, Barco has reinvented the way it works, as an organisation, as well as how it reaches out to customers and partners. It is expanding into corporate accounts and strategic alliances, such as the recent partnership with Logitech and Trustech Audio Visual Solution LLP, a major distributor in the Indian Unified Communications space, to expand its reach across tier-2 and tier-3 cities in the country. It is also conducting webinars and offering online tutorials to enable its partners to provide the best customer experience possible.

CYBERSECURITY A PRIORITY 
Barco understands the graveness of cyber threats and designs products that can withstand such perils. While security breaches come in different forms, the most common ones involve either the extraction of sensitive information or attacks on a company’s core IT system. The lockdown and ensuing work-from-home has led to an increase in cyberattacks and enterprises and individuals need secure solutions to combat possible breaches. Barco’s ClickShare Conference is the perfect example of its focus on minimising cyber threats.