Video Conferencing and the Mainstream Corporate World

The world of business is rapidly changing, driven by technological developments, workplace and workforce shifts. Collaboration is now taking center stage in strategies of small and large organizations, propelled by the need to have fast product and process development, share experiences and knowledge among team members, and recruit better teams. In turn, video conferencing has adapted quickly to meet the new set of organizational and customer requirements, such as hiring interns and recruiting offshore professionals or offshore project development projects. In fact, video conferencing services like Blue Jeans have expanded from a room-centered technology to becoming an integral part of personal communication application on mobile and desktop devices. Below are the trends and developments that are driving video conferencing to the corporate mainstream.

Increased Reliability

A business tool has to be reliable to be successful. That solution should provide a consistent user experience at all times, otherwise users will opt for another one. This rings true especially in the world of communications where many people participate and many options available – such as email, chat, text, video and voice.

When it comes to video conferencing, reliability is pegged on:

• Meetings launching on time: Having participants wait as the host tries to resolve a connection problem or is fixing computer peripheral devices is an unacceptable waste of time. This demotivates workers on utilizing video conferencing systems for any future meetings.
• User experience should be repeatable and solid: Video should be high-definition and audio should be clear. Additionally, communications delay ought to be low to support an interactive, natural session. If a modern electronic meeting cannot meet just like physical contact, then your workers will choose to avoid video conferencing solutions.

Infrastructure as Software

Implementing enterprise software on virtual and physical servers is a common technological solution in the world of business for a long time. However, the past few years have seen this concept integrated into the world of video conferencing where high-speed, complex computations times are critical for an acceptable user experience.

The benefits from this new approach revolve around flexibility:

• Licensing flexibility means clients purchase licenses in single units and can contract or expand their pool of license when they need to, without worrying about hardware limitations
• Technology flexibility means that companies no longer have to worry about carrying out hardware upgrade. Instead, simple software updates are all that are required.
• Deployment flexibility means customers use third-party cloud offerings or even deploy solutions from their own data centers.
• Business model flexibility means that your company can purchase the infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go operating model.

New Technologies and Services Adoption

The video conferencing industry has been around for a few decades now and advances in the software field have continued to drive lower bandwidth requirements, feature-rich applications and high-quality video. However, the biggest trend, at least to the public, is the move towards cloud services.

Cloud services give businesses the ability to connect with everyone via the Internet. Such services enable clients to consume video infrastructure as a service rather than as a product, a relatively new business angle in the video conference industry. Cloud-based services give customers the combination of:

• Protection against obsolescence
• Scalability protection
• Redundancy protection
• Short deployment time
• Strong performance
• Flexibility
• Affordability

Video conferencing vendors are also adopting new compression schemes like H.265 and VP9. They offer support for high-definition at 30 to 50 percent lower bandwidths, enabling video communication to be even more practical and affordable. WebRTS enables the video in the Web browser, making video conferencing solutions downloads a thing of the past because just about any internet-connected devices can become a video terminal.

The Inter-Company Video Conferencing Growth

A few years ago, business deployed video conferencing as an internal tool for communication among colleagues on the same network. In many cases, this video conferencing blocked outgoing and incoming IP video calls due to security policies. Even when IP video traffic could leave or enter the business’ network, there were additional hurdles like vendor interoperability and call routing. Therefore, even with interest in expanding inter-company video, attempts would fail. Soon, many companies abandoned the entire concept.

Today, companies are softening their stance on IP video and most allow outgoing video traffic to leave their network. Additionally, service providers have rapidly expanded their offerings to give companies the chance to meet over video in the cloud environment. Video conferencing has slowly become a common route for inter-company communications.

The Bottom Line

Whether you are a business line manager, business owner, IT professional, or working in a small or large enterprise, the technology changes and trends outlined above should be a part of your strategic planning process. Video teleconferencing communication is now mainstream, not only saving you travel expenses, but also providing you with new ways of getting work done. Businesses that do not or are hesitant to adopt video conferencing as a communications tool risk becoming non-competitive in today’s world where business have to thrive in cut-throat competition.