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Patrick Nowicki


Patrick Nowicki is a technical architect for CDW's collaboration practice and has more than 20 years of experience in unified communications. His responsibilities include new solution design and creation, as well as ongoing maintenance of existing CDW, Cisco and Microsoft UC offerings.

Technical Architect


7 Huddle Space Trends in 2021

As employees return to the office, companies are likely to continue their embrace of video collaboration workflows.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
January 27, 2021
Digital Workspace, Software

Collaboration huddle spaces were growing in popularity before the coronavirus pandemic hit, and they’re likely to see continued adoption as employees return to work throughout the current year. But huddle spaces in 2021 are likely to look a bit different than they did in 2019. Learn how CDW can optimize your video collaboration environment. The…

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Avaya Cloud Office Serves Up Collaboration Solutions

Avaya’s collaboration tools offer many reasons to move to the cloud, including a solid uptime guarantee.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
December 22, 2020
Cloud, Digital Workspace

If you haven’t moved some portion of your collaboration needs to the cloud yet, you are likely thinking about it. While on-premises communications platforms had been popular for the past several decades, “the times they are a-changin.” Almost every customer I talk to is planning a move to the cloud for at least some portion…

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Comparing the New RingCentral Video to RingCentral Meeting

RingCentral’s move to a new communications platform, while still developing, offers a streamlined user experience.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Corey Buskirk
|
August 6, 2020
Digital Workspace

[sayit]RingCentral is one of the fastest-growing communications platforms out there supporting messaging, video and phones. One of the core components to the platform for years has been the RingCentral Meetings (RCM) platform powered by Zoom on the backend. This rebranded third-party meeting technology seamlessly integrates with the phones and messaging at the core of the…

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Considerations for Building the Perfect Huddle Room — Part 2

These four additional pointers will help you find the right collaboration solution for small spaces.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Josh Walters
|
November 12, 2019
Digital Workspace

In part 1 of this blog series, we looked at several factors including meeting platform support and integration capabilities, audio quality and ease of support when shopping around for the right huddle room solution. We will now wrap things up by considering the solution’s ease of use and its overall cost as important factors to…

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Considerations for Building the Perfect Huddle Room — Part 1

Evaluate these key factors when choosing a collaboration solution for your small meeting spaces.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Josh Walters
|
November 7, 2019
Digital Workspace

Huddle room spaces are dramatically growing in the business space over the next three to four years, and many companies are starting to evaluate collaboration solutions so they can plan for and make use of these new workspaces in their offices. With a plethora of technologies on the market, and more rapidly being developed by…

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Drive Adoption of Your Collaboration Solutions by Tracking These 3 Metrics

To get the most out of collaboration platforms such as Cisco Webex, measure how the tools are being used — and how well they’re performing.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
July 3, 2019
Digital Workspace, Software

It’s easy to take collaboration tools for granted. They’ve evolved gradually over time, adding a feature here and upgrading a user experience there. Now, platforms such as Cisco Webex allow users from around the world to collaborate via HD video, screen sharing, voice and chat. They really are incredible tools that allow for a level…

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3 Considerations for Supporting Multiple Collaboration Platforms

To simplify workflows and unify communications, organizations that operate more than one collaboration suite must integrate them effectively.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
April 17, 2019
Digital Workspace, Services, Software

It happens almost by accident. An organization adopts a cloud collaboration suite, giving employees the ability to share files, exchange messages, manage their calendars and set up voice and video calls — all on a single platform. But then the company merges with another organization, which is using a similar platform from another vendor. Meanwhile,…

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7 Considerations before Jumping into Microsoft Teams Real-Time Workloads

Minding the details of this offering can save you serious headaches down the road.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Josh Walters
|
January 17, 2019
Digital Workspace, Cloud, Software

If you have evaluated or use Office 365 for any of your collaboration and productivity needs, I don't need to tell you how popular Microsoft Teams has become in the marketplace, even recently surpassing Slack in user adoption. However, many organizations have been more tentative about moving to Microsoft Teams for calling and meetings. This…

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Introducing Cisco’s New and Improved Webex Meetings

WBS 33.3 presents a leap forward in user experience.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Lisa Bell
|
July 26, 2018
Digital Workspace, Services, Software

I recently attended Cisco Live 2018, and one topic at the event in Orlando that drew my attention was the updates to Webex Meetings. If you are using Cisco’s Webex Meetings today, hopefully you have already heard that Webex version WBS 33.3 is right around the corner. What does this mean to you and your…

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Maximizing the Potential of Your Microsoft Surface Hub — Part 3

The Surface Hub offers definitive value to organizations, as long as they know how to implement it.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
May 7, 2018
Digital Workspace

In my first post on the Surface Hub, I focused on potential new use cases for this hybrid devices. Then my second blog post in this series took a deeper dive into the Surface Hub’s features and how it compared to the competition. Now, I'm finally getting around to the question of whether this product is…

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Weighing the Costs and Benefits of the Microsoft Surface Hub — Part 2

Organizations considering the Surface Hub or another collaborative whiteboard should look at the device’s price and features, as well as their IT environment.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
April 30, 2018
Digital Workspace

Some innovative technologies come onto the market without a clearly defined use case (or, perhaps, a clearly marketed one). They pull together features from other technologies and combine them in a new way. And while this hybrid isn’t a great fit for the original workplace settings it was pulled from, it offers opportunities for creating…

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Finding a Niche for the Microsoft Surface Hub — Part 1

A deep dive into the features of this digital workspace device offers a few surprises.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
April 24, 2018
Digital Workspace, Software

One of the main responsibilities in my job as an architect is to look at what's happening in the industry, discuss with people closest to the sources and then experience the innovations for myself to help set direction for CDW and provide recommendations to our customers. When I first saw the Surface Hub, I didn’t…

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Overcoming Application Overload — Part 3

Fine-tuning your adoption campaign may require factoring in some additional considerations.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Brian Dixon
|
October 30, 2017
Digital Workspace, Services

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, we touched on the need for thoroughly planning out an application adoption strategy and some of the key tactics for a successful rollout. This last post will focus on additional considerations for application adoption. Historically, many IT organizations have focused on costs, maintaining system health and…

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Overcoming Application Overload — Part 2

These four key tactics will help your organization maintain application adoption.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Brian Dixon
|
October 25, 2017
Digital Workspace, Services

In our previous post, we laid out the strategies that CDW uses to help organizations plan a successful application rollout that will lead to getting the most business value out of your application. Following a high-level process like that, it is important to keep the project on track and accomplish your goals, but the details behind…

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Overcoming Application Overload — Part 1

Realizing the full potential of business applications requires smart planning for adoption.

By Patrick Nowicki  and Brian Dixon
|
October 23, 2017
Digital Workspace, Services

It seems like new applications pop up every five minutes, and while some companies have a monopoly on a new type of application, it doesn’t take long before a contender comes along and puts their own spin on the concept. When the new application hits the market, there is always hype around its great features…

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Cisco Provides a Bridge Over Troubled Waters

Along with updates to the system’s instant messaging and Presence tools, improvements to Cisco Expressway now open communication to Skype for Business users.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
July 20, 2017
Digital Workspace

The end users of many on-premises and hosted Cisco Unified Communication customers have never been able to communicate natively from their Cisco Jabber clients to their third-party business partners who use Microsoft’s Lync or Skype for Business. It’s as if they were on opposite sides of a river with no “bridge” to cross, leaving them…

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Microsoft and Cisco: When Collaboration Worlds Collide

While the vendors are often present in the same environment, finding ways for them to work together can be difficult.

By Patrick Nowicki
|
May 2, 2017
Cloud, Digital Workspace

"How do I get the most out of my investment?" It’s a question all IT organizations ask themselves when they review applications they have in their environment, especially when considering upgrades and migrations. This question can and ought to be answered with both technical and user adoption considerations in mind. And it presents quite the…

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