Toward a borderless world

Technologies such as cloud and telepresence in the 21st century could help business escape the tyranny of distance, claims Adrian Thirkill

Thirkill: Cloud and telepresence are helping businesses collaborate regionally and globally

As Western economies shifted from being goods- to services-based, the relationship of location to business has changed.

More and more services are being delivered online, and this is affecting the business world. E-tailers, for example, have been able to offer lower prices because of savings in staff and premises. Online marketplaces like Alibaba.com connect businesses with low-cost manufacturers and suppliers.

Now, technologies such as telepresence and cloud computing may transform the way we work. Physical meetings have been a cornerstone of business for centuries, but with cost reduction (and environmental waste) higher on the corporate agenda, business travel is becoming less justifiable.

We believe one executive in three spends more than 20 per cent of their working hours travelling, often to maintain personal contact with customers and colleagues.

Technologies like telepresence make it easier to schedule meetings at short notice and reduce the need for business travel.

Companies may deploy private clouds, outsourcing server management to a third party and no longer need server rooms on their own premises.

This gives them more scope in office location, and size. Some may be able to dispense with having actual physical premises altogether.

And where a business based in, for example, London or Amsterdam would have been largely limited to attracting workers in the surrounding area, things like flexible working give them more ability to recruit internationally.

In the future, a highly distributed business model may become the norm. Firms may have product designers in Brussels working alongside process engineers in Milan, all under the direction of a chief executive in Hong Kong.

This could affect property prices, reducing or even ending phenomena such as the north-south divide in the UK.

While this may not be good news for estate agents, what these trends will bring, above all, is opportunity. They will bring firms closer to their customers and employees than ever before.

They promise to create a borderless world where the promised free movement of labour and capital finally comes to fruition, giving businesses instantaneous access to new customers and increased opportunity to expand and succeed.

Winners won’t be those with the biggest offices or the most radical architecture, but those with a firm eye to the bottom line while remaining open to the possibilities of new business and organisational structures underpinned by managed technologies.

Adrian Thirkill is global customer operations director at Easynet Global Services