Google Brings the Fight to Enterprise Video Conferencing
December 11, 2014
By Mae Kowalke
TMCnet Contributor
We’re in the age of big technology firms all vying with each other in one hot technology space after another. One of the new battlefields is enterprise video conferencing, and Google (News - Alert) has recently announced its latest salvo.
The Google solution is called the Chromebox, and it is intended to be a plug-and-play enterprise videoconferencing solution that does away with the complexity of legacy boardroom videoconferencing solutions but without sacrificing the durability and enterprise advantages of these older systems.
The Chromebox is a hardware videoconferencing end-point that looks a lot like the Apple (News - Alert) TV and comes with a 1080p HD camera, microphone, speaker, remote control, and video codec. The enterprise customer attaches its own display.
The solution starts at around $999, and this includes the first year’s $250 management fee.
Of course, the Chromebox also plays extremely nicely with other Google technology such as Google Hangouts and Google Docs. This is one reason why businesses that are already using the other Google technology might want to hop aboard and go all-Google.
But in my mind and others, there is the question of whether Google will adequately support call recording and archiving. This potentially overlooked feature is something the consumer-facing Google could miss, but companies will miss more dearly.
Video conference call recording is a useful feature for pulling data from meetings, it also can be a compliance issue for some companies.
A good video conference recording solution delivers transparency and can ensure compliance and security through in-house recording.
It also is possible to use conference recordings with enterprise search to have an archive of all meetings and interactions for corporate search, which unlocks the unstructured data from such meetings.
It is quite possible Google will not rise to the challenge with this feature. That could be opportunity for other firms such as Microsoft (News - Alert) as the space heats up and the big tech giants go at it again in a new technology arena.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi