Guest post by Isaac Garcia 

More than ever, companies and their teams are juggling projects across continents and time zones, and require tools that enable them to execute efficiently in the office and on the road.

For years now, companies have attempted to collaborate by piecing together tools to help their teams maintain version control, engage in conversations, share files, and plan and execute projects. According to a recent Forrester Research report on the state of collaboration, 46 percent of executives said they are investing in or expanding team workspace investments to help resolve collaboration points ("The State of Collaboration Software Implementations: 2011" March, 2011). 

Until now, a lot of what we have seen is collaboration vendors attempting to solve the above mentioned problems from two different approaches: with a simplistic or a complex model. Vendors such as Dropbox and Yammer enter the market with simple freemium services to quickly attract users and build awareness. And, it's been working, with many companies or individual users integrating these solutions within their current workflow processes. 

While these point solutions are attractive to end users and small teams, they only serve as a temporary patch to a deeper collaboration problem. As businesses mature, their needs become more intricate and concerns about security, compliance and performance begin to take higher priority. This is something that some vendors are catching on to, spurring them to "beef-up" their solutions. We've seen this most recently following impressive, back-to-back funding announcements from Box.net, who garnered over $100M in venture capital to start building their once-niche solution into a more comprehensive collaboration suite.

On the other hand, businesses tend to outgrow simple tools for two reasons: Employee growth (more users) or business maturity (process complexity, workflow requirements and compliance). As a result, businesses tend to reach far on the other side of the spectrum to enterprise-class solutions (such as SharePoint and Cisco) to solve their 'more intricate' collaboration needs. However, as these solution providers and others in the space are observing, even large companies are limited on the budget and resources needed to integrate, configure and train their employees on these applications, which often leads to low user adoption. 

These enterprise class providers are paying attention. Earlier this year, Cisco acquired Versly to add additional features and a new component of simplicity to their collaboration portfolio, which is one of the company's five priorities and represents what Cisco believes to be a $45 billion market. 

As it appears, vendors on both sides of the spectrum are realizing a large demand for the same type of collaboration platform--a solution that embraces ease-of-use without sacrificing the need for more comprehensive workflow and business process. And, it's evident that companies and their teams are demanding offerings that are more than just a point solution, but less than a traditional enterprise application. Vendors are listening. 

They're ultimately working to find a new middle ground that speaks to the requirements of this majority vote from businesses. As such, the future of collaboration is moving not to the fringe, but squarely in the middle where businesses are operating on a daily basis. 

And as the definition of collaboration continues to be blurred, it's the customers, not the vendors, who will shape the collaboration space and the future of how teams work.     

Isaac Garcia is the co-founder and CEO of Central Desktop, where he oversees strategy and business execution for the company. Recognizing a critical need for businesses to collaborate both internally and externally, Isaac co-founded Central Desktop, one of the first cloud-based collaboration platforms on the market to deliver a flexible solution that would appeal to teams and companies of all sizes. Isaac is a startup veteran who has successfully founded, built and sold industry-changing companies.