The interest in video conferencing has been steadily increasing over the last few years, with vendors reporting growing sales, and growing interest from customers looking to use video conferencing as a way to avoid travel time and expenses, and improve collaboration for geographically distributed workgroups.
Adoption trends are all pointing to enterprises accepting that we’ve reached the age of video. As managed services are on the rise and scalable video becomes more accessible, it means video conferencing is becoming an integral tool to the overall communications infrastructure for the enterprise.
Companies are increasingly looking at ways to integrate it into their hosted phone and unified communications architectures, extend video conferencing to mobile and remote users via desktop and cellular devices, enable video conferencing across company boundaries, and meet the need to manage video delivery and quality.
Currently, there is a broad spectrum of solutions available, providing many options for the inquiring customer. There are basically a few levels of videoconferencing and they are multi-codec, room-based, executive desktop, and consumer level. Depending on the needs of the customer, each will play a specific role in how and when a person or enterprise deploys a video conferencing solution.
Video conferencing provides a host of benefits. With a low-cost, Web-based alternative, an easy-to-use video conferencing setup can easily replace having to bring in a staff of new hires to train.
Conferencing also offers compelling financial and technical advantages, which is why a number of businesses around the globe are interested in making the move. Businesses can extend their service hours, lower their employee turnover, and not be limited by geography, as a virtual contact center can be set up anywhere. In the latter case, video call centers are an excellent way to expand the customer experience by offering another channel for customers to communicate.
The general consensus on virtualization and Web conferencing is that there is an improved work-life balance and higher employee morale.
From an organizational perspective, video conferencing enables organization to save on infrastructure, equipment and other costs.
Edited by Alisen Downey