Study Provides Tech Buyers Tips On Video-Conferencing Tools

IDC has done a comprehensive study on market trends around videoconferencing. The research was a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the characteristics that can help videoconferencing solutions gain success with technology buyers.

According to the study, the increasing use of videoconferencing within organizations is being driven by a desire to:

• Collaborate more effectively (via high-resolution video, audio, and data content and other tools and capabilities) with a wider circle of coworkers in huddle rooms, at desktops, in remote offices and on mobile devices from any location.
• Expand the use of video externally to include the growing demand for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) sessions with customers, clients, business partners, and prospects.
• Integrate/embed video with key business processes and applications (e.g., customer service, HR, remote diagnostics and distance learning).

For videoconferencing to be a successful purchase, IDC recommended technology buyers to consider the following:

• The video-conferencing solution should be user-centric with richer, more intuitive user interface (UI) – basically a single software-based interface to manage video collaboration from whatever device, from any location, with data content, across any applications that may be integrated with one or more company business processes.
• Solution providers should demonstrate that video integration with UC&C solutions (telephones, instant messaging, web conferencing, and other collaboration applications) increases the overall value of video solutions for customers and shows a vendor/partner commitment to selling solutions compared with just selling standalone videoconferencing systems.
• As an alternative to deploying video network infrastructure on-premises, video-as-a-service (VaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings can provide much-needed flexibility and scalability and are less capital-intensive options for buyers to consider for videoconferencing.
• Video cloud services should be considered for those organizations lacking the IT skills and resources to manage and support their own enterprise video infrastructure. Video cloud services can enable companies to deploy video with limited IT resources, provide end-user access to video sessions regardless of location for a monthly fee per client or endpoint, and simplify firewall integration, traversal, and management. In short, cloud can help change the economics of videoconferencing for many companies, especially small and midsize companies.
• Organizations should be aware of the opportunity that web browsers present for real-time video collaboration. A web browser provides an alternative for anyone who does not have access to a room or other video endpoint system or does not have a vendor software client installed on his or per PC or mobile device. Depending on the circumstances, a web browser usually requires a software plug-in to be installed to support a specific vendors’ collaboration session (e.g., for audio and video).
• For capturing, storing, and managing the many video collaboration sessions that occur within organizations for on-demand access by employees, solutions such as video content management, rich media content streaming, and application sharing continue to draw significant interest from customers.

With new advancements in videoconferencing technology, buyers ought to consider what their options are. In the tech industry of today, videoconferencing can conveniently take place in the Cloud.