Video conferencing is everywhere you look these days and plenty of businesses use solutions such as Skype, Google Hangouts, FaceTime and WebEx. But are these really up to the job of providing a decent solution for enterprises, especially larger organisations who may want to hook up with offices around the globe?
Recent reports suggest they’re not; Skype has recently been attacked by malware and seems to be becoming a more popular target, not good for ‘closed’ meetings and perfect for industrial espionage.
We reported recently that enterprise–grade video conferencing solutions have taken something of a hit recently, with leaders Cisco reporting a drop in revenue. However, this seems to be something of an overall tightening of budgets, rather than a lack of interest from enterprises.
White Paper: Dynamic Video Collaboration: Developing the Business Case
Consumer video conferencing solutions like those described above can be useful for the SMB, but for larger enterprises, just using these can affect the credibility of your organisation. Trying to use Skype as a means to conference around the globe simply isn’t good enough as there are often quality problems and it’s really not an enterprise-grade solution.
Whilst Adobe Connect and WebEx were the precursor to the rise in video conferencing, they are “more about active speakers and passive participants and less about interactive/collaborative communications,” according to Robin Raulf-Sager of RadVision Blogs.
Today’s video conferencing needs more; HD quality, collaboration and the ability to have more than one active participant. There’s no doubt that VC can have a seriously positive effect on an enterprise and this is what is slowly driving adoption.
However, as was first the case with cloud, adoption is slow for enterprise class solutions such as provided by Cisco and Polycom; for a start, investment is needed and secondly those old security issues of ‘free tools’ seem to be rearing their head again. This is the reason that enterprise VC solutions are not free to use.
In order to create a customised solution that integrates video, security, collaboration, reliability, scalability and so forth, enterprises have to get to grips with integration of video conferencing and how much it can mean to its business.
The way the world of business is changing, professional video conferencing solutions offer significant ROI simply because it simplifies the processes of workflows and allows collaboration in a way not offered before.
Image courtesy of Stockfreeimages
An interesting article – as well as simplifying workflow and allowing collaboration, video conferencing can also save time and money that would be spent on travel – an important consideration for both smaller and larger companies.
If you look for collaboration, you certainly mean global reach and immediate implementation without any software to be installed at point of contact. This is a minimum for employees or partners to be included into any business video conference. Quality of the image itself may be important if sharing somthing like videos, photos, to be validated as such. But most value in such virtual meetings come from audience feed backs, questions and overall atmosphere of collaboration. If you target actual exchanges of views, around a speaker and around shared content (product review, presentation), you need to see http://www.glowbl.com
Let me know your thoughts, I’ll be happy to provide you with additional info.
Of course, Enterprise video conferencing is a key requirement for any business in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive world. Enterprises are making use of various web conferencing tools such as WebEx, gomeetnow, gotomeeting or deploying on premise web conferencing appliance such as RHUB appliances in order to conduct web-video conferencing, audio conferencing, webinars, web meetings, online meetings etc.