Video conferencing, communication and collaboration are nothing new to enterprise businesses, yet mass adoption remains just across the horizon.
Until today, we (as an industry) haven’t really stopped to take a look at the enterprise communications climate holistically, and it may be that we just didn’t have the right ingredients.
We have a unique perspective at Vyopta because we’ve seen the data for the world’s leading enterprises on how they use video. Here are the 4 signs that the world is finally ready for mass video adoption.
Bigger IT Budgets
According to CIO Insight – CIO’s will be looking at bigger IT budgets in 2015 due to the technology department overlap with a variety of business objectives – unified communications and cloud video communications technologies being at the forefront. “To support enterprise-wide goals for 2015, IT departments will likely seek to further improve customer experiences, analytics and cloud services.”
Bigger IT budgets will mean bigger pushes for IT resources that help improve user experience and productivity within the organization – we are at the point where the need for secure, user-friendly, cloud-based video collaboration comes in and further drives the integration of video into company culture. We have found that video usage rapidly accelerates to a tipping point once endpoints reach a certain rate of penetration to the workforce. And bigger budgets mean there are more endpoints to help start this growth cycle.
Microsoft Lync (Skype for Business)
If you haven’t heard of these guys yet, you’ve probably happened upon this article by mistake. Lync takes voice, video, and chat to a whole new level with the kind of anytime, anywhere connections that the enterprise demands in 2015. Microsoft Lync is so easy to access that it’s ultimately blurring the line between work and home and creating a new, more efficient means of collaborating.
When I say “blurring the line between work and home” I don’t mean it in a bad way. It’s pretty obvious that people in 2015 like to work whenever they feel like it, rather than being shackled to 8 to 5 to business hours and rush hour traffic.
Opening the lines of communication and improving access to anytime, anywhere collaboration means the average workweek of an employee is going to fundamentally change when companies need people at their most productive. The other main benefit of Lync (or Skype for Business), is that it embeds communication and collaboration into all the productivity applications that customers already use like Office 365. As we’ve learned from Enterprise Connect 2015, many companies are eager to embrace Lync for this purpose.
From a recent Microsoft blog, “Together with our customers and partners, Microsoft has transformed enterprise communications. Over 100 million people now use Microsoft Lync to communicate for work, with 79 percent of U.S. enterprises currently using or planning to deploy Lync for telephony.”
Be on the look out for more big things to come from Microsoft in the collaboration industry and bigger Lync deployments this year than ever before.
UCaaS
Unified communications as a service grew quite a bit in 2014 and continues to crush it on the enterprise communications front. “More enterprises adopted cloud-based UC in 2014. According to Nemertes Research’s Enterprise Technology Benchmark, 63% of companies had at least one UC app in the cloud, with Web conferencing as the most widely adopted product.”
As on-premise infrastructure environments near the end of their operating life, companies are looking to cloud solutions for unified communications. UC deployments are complex and require a big shift in internal IT resources. Cloud-based IT requires a different set of capabilities and even a different IT Support Organization than traditional infrastructure.
UCaaS is already becoming a huge driver for web conferencing and it will be the same for video as more uc services continue integrating video collaboration.
From a new article on enterprise connect 2015 – “The global UCaaS market closed out 2014 with revenue at $2.1 billion and is expected to more than double its revenue over the next three years, reaching $4.9 billion, said Bill Haskins, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse Research.”
WebRTC
UCC vendors will most likely continue to integrate WebRTC products because WebRTC has the potential to turn video communications on its head. Real-time communications within browsers, and without requiring downloads or plugins means users will have easy access to video collaboration without even trying – point for video.
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has already begun mandating WebRTC standards for browsers, requiring browser makers supporting WebRTC to implement VP8 and H.264 video codecs.
Video professionals will agree that WebRTC is relevant enough to meet today’s communication demands and has the potential to become the standard, dominant form of communication in the enterprise space.
Got Mass Video Adoption?
As video adoption turns into MASS video adoption, we’re predicting that the next generation of video network IT teams will need tools to help them better manage and resolve issues with historical analytics and real-time video monitoring.
