Since I am a child of the 20th century, I remember as a kid, and later in the teenage period, that “postman” was an institution. He was like a window into the world, a man who brings good or bad news, bills or pensions. He was…the Android mobile phone of my childhood.

Remember the history classes and lessons on Ancient Greece? A lecture about Battle of Marathon and the legendary Filipides, a man who ran from the Marathon Field to Athens, just to tell his fellow citizens that Athens had defeated Persia. He managed to convey the message but died of exhaustion immediately after.

In the Game of Thrones series, they have figured it out that it is better to send the raven to carry such messages.

Do you remember the legendary sentences from the cartoon Speedy Gonzalez:  “Paprika is red every day, General Gracias happy birthday to your “? How many of the poor mice couriers got injured or died trying to carry forward this “important” message until it was successfully passed on by Speedy Gonzales.

Since I am a child of the 20th century, I remember as a kid, and later in the teenage period, that “postman” was an institution. He was like a window into the world, a man who brings good or bad news, bills or pensions. He was…the Android mobile phone of my childhood.

If all of this was happening in the 21st century, we would probably never know about the athletic discipline marathon and the small mice that had to die just to convey a banal message to General Gracias. And I would have one nice memory less to remember from my childhood.

If I compare all these examples above, we find what they have in common – someone had to go from point A to point B to transfer someone else a message. That lasted for centuries. Then everything changed in just a few years. As we entered the 21st century, the millennium bug has begun a digital revolution that continues to nowadays.  It has changed our lives collectively. The massive use of PC and the Internet has led to dramatic changes of people’s lives and above all ways we communicate. Email, chat, instant message, all these are things that we could not even imagine in the late 80s, waiting for the postman to bring us a letter, a postcard or a telegram from someone dear to us.

In the last couple of years there have been many other communication tools (Facebook, Skype, Viber, Whatsapp …), while the PC has been replaced with mobile phones, tablets and laptops. With the emergence of all these tools, applications and devices it has become clear that even business communication cannot remain the same. Focus of business communication has been shifted to a brief form of messages with possibility of integrating it with business applications and company directories and domains. A swift reaction and efficient time usage is the first thing that was requested. Connect from anywhere, anytime, anyhow  was a challenge but it is quite logical that responses to these requests came very quickly. I’ll mention some of them.

He appeared at the beginning of 2015 as a response of Cisco to already existing requests. CiscoSpark is a cloud platform that gives the possibility to create a complete collaboration environment for individuals, but above all for teams (teamwork). Collaboration environment implies the ability to schedule appointments or 1 to 1 conversations with included features: Meeting, Messaging and Calling and additional functionality such as screen sharing, file sharing or whiteboard. The platform on which it was built on is open source so that the user himself can update Spark at his discretion with the help of the API. Although it is a cloud platform, with the help of appropriate connectors, it is possible to integrate it with company AD, Exchange, or IP telephony. This way, users of the platform are given the opportunity to fully utilize existing company resources.

Microsoft is one of the most widespread vendors around the world. Therefore, it is logical they have one of the best positioned applications on the market when it comes to business communication platforms. Microsoft bought Skype in 2011. Skype for Business is not the same as “regular” Skype, which became domestic in almost any home. The difference is exactly in what is the point of this text, business communication. Easy integration with all Microsoft products is implied. It is used in the cloud but also in the local version. Because of its worldwide distribution, the task of all other vendors is to enable the interoperability of other platforms with Skype for Business.

Perhaps the most famous teamwork application. It was firstly created as an internal company application but became globally used from 2013. The name was given as an abbreviation for: “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge“. It’s a cloud platform that has been integrated with many other platforms such as: Google Drive, Trello, Dropbox, Herox, Github, Zendesk and others.

Users most often know in advance what platform they want to use. There are various factors that instigate this decision:

• Existing infrastructure
• The price
• The need for voice, video and conference functions

The choice of business messaging platform is a very important today. Depending on the company’s activity, users can save a lot of resources, time and money using the right application for their job.

We in Saga are working on finding the right solution for all our users and integrate this solution into the existing user’s infrastructure. We do not have prejudices or favorites in this field so our customers can count on the best solution and maximum professionalism.

And to conclude. Many of us have dreamed as a kid about how the future will look like. Some of the fantasies were certainly related to mobile phones, computers, the Internet and other current trends of our modern times. Most of these things, as in the books of Jules Verne, have come to life. What we still do not know is what is awaiting us in 15 years. I believe the future has many surprises stored for us.