The State of Video Conferencing: 10 Key Data Points

by Chris Preimesberger

Currently, video accounts for about 10 percent of the world’s mobile traffic; by the end of 2015, it is expected to zoom to as much as 65 percent of mobile usage. As the global workforce becomes increasingly mobile and employees demand workplace flexibility that allows them to achieve greater work-life balance, businesses will respond by offering telecommuting options to employees. This flexibility will coincide with a greater number of mobile devices on the market that are designed for video conferences, including smartphones, tablets and videophones. —From Heavyreading.com

Young workers raised on technology who came into the marketplace less than a decade ago are beginning to move up the corporate management ladder, and they’re expecting to be able to use high-quality, business-class video communications in their jobs, reported a survey by Cisco Systems. Results from the Global Young Executives’ Video Attitude Survey, released Aug. 5, found that three out of five executives age 34 or younger will rely on business-class video over the next five to 10 years, and 87 percent believe video has a significant positive impact on a company, from saving money on travel costs to improving the experience of telecommuters to attracting high-level talent. —From eWEEK.com

People who use a conferencing solution rank it as one of the most important IT priorities for their company, second only to network security.

The IT department is now firmly in control of video conferencing, enabling this solution to be virtualized and therefore providing greater efficiencies and cost savings.

Personal and mobile video is raising concerns about deployment scale. In the environment of BYOD, many vendors provide video clients with compatible with iOS, Android, Windows and Mac personal systems. The low cost of these clients, combined with their convenience, ease of use and ability to deliver high-quality audio and video, has changed the nature of the problem facing IT managers and video conferencing planners. With so many endpoints deployed, the demand for multipoint capabilities is likely to skyrocket, while the need for infrastructure solutions to manage and monitor devices and to optimize bandwidth utilization will become even more important.

Services are newsworthy, but CPE (customer premises equipment) strategies remain in place. Even though many vendors have introduced infrastructure as a service in the past two to three years, recent Wainhouse Research studies suggest that a large percentage of enterprises still rely on on-premises solutions for video conferencing deployments. With in-house equipment, the infrastructure that enables multipoint devices is typically the most expensive infrastructure component.

Video infrastructure has traditionally relied on its own special technologies with extensive use of digital signal processors (DSPs) and custom ASICs, which are expensive to develop, maintain and purchase. Enterprise video conferencing managers should look for video infrastructure that fits easily into their data center environment and can be managed with common tools. Virtualized applications should be available as pure software solutions that customers can load on their own server hardware.

Because of cost restraints, many enterprises centralize their bridging hardware into a small number of locations or even a single location with a large multipoint control unit (MCU). This can lead to increased latency, more high-cost wide-area network (WAN) bandwidth consumption and a less-pleasing overall user experience. Team leaders and video specialists looking to support users on a distributed or global basis should consider bridging solutions that are designed for a distributed architecture and do not cause a degraded user experience.

Successful video adoption requires that video conferencing be available on many types of devices and that end users be able to simply dial a video call and have the call connect. Especially as bring-your-own-device (BYOD) becomes the norm, seamless interoperability between systems is an absolute requirement.

Rather than having to purchase capacity to handle projected future growth, which hardware-centric solutions require, enterprises should look for infrastructure products that run in a virtual environment and provide flexible licensing agreements so that the enterprise pays for what it needs as it needs it, and no more.