It’s quite possible that the business world is right on the cusp of another revolution. This time, one that involves interactive digital whiteboards.
These large interactive touchscreens are the key to making meetings more productive and inclusive of geographically-dispersed teams. They typically come with a selection of collaboration tools that allow both local and remote meeting participants to share ideas easily and seamlessly.
While whiteboards are currently considered a “niche” product, they nonetheless offer an opportunity for resellers to get in on the ground floor in a market that’s projected to be worth a lot of money, very soon.
21% projected growth
A report by Research and Markets says that “…the global interactive whiteboard market is forecast to grow from $4,3 billion in 2018 to $5.2 billion by 2023”, which is growth of just under 21%.
And that growth is proving attractive. Korean electronics giant, Samsung, has started offering enterprise-grade interactive whiteboards, at a lower price than incumbent vendors.
Bridging behaviours
Says Tarsus Distribution’s Samsung Product Manager, Charl van den Berg, “What makes these products so interesting is the way they bridge existing behaviours and the digital world.
“They enable people to jot notes, draw graphs and organograms, and create mind maps on a digital display, rather than writing on a traditional flipchart or whiteboard with a marker. Then, they can save presentations, annotations, notes, and visualisations as a digital file that can be easily shared with everyone who needs access to the materials,” he says.
Goodbye flipcharts
Flipcharts have, until recently, been the preferred method of illustrating ideas in meeting rooms around the world. Affordable digital interactive whiteboards can change all that, and improve the meeting experience in the process.
“Everyone who has presented on a flipchart has experienced the problem of running out of space and then needing to write in tiny script to fit all the group’s thoughts on the page,” says van den Berg. “This problem disappears when you’re using an interactive whiteboard. Visual quality is also great, with products that support full HD and 4K resolution.”
Organisation-wide collaboration
Van den Berg adds that whiteboards “…bring brainstorms and meetings into the 21st century…” with their touch interfaces and remote accessibility. This allows everyone in an organisation to collaborate and connect, no matter where they are.
So while we’re not quite at the point where digital interactive whiteboards are the de facto meeting room standard everywhere, that reality could be right around the next corner thanks to the technology’s projected growth path and the entrance into the market of a big player like Samsung.
Charl van den Berg is the Samsung Product Manager at Tarsus Distribution.
