TWELVE FORCES SHAPING THE FUTURE OF VIDEOCONFERENCING
We have identified twelve business, technology, cultural and environmental shifts that are driving interest in and adoption of videoconferencing and collaboration solutions. The energy from these forces is coming together in such a way that the video optimist within us believes that videoconferencing adoption is sure to “explode over in the next 3-5 years”.
1. Globalization: While much has been written about the positive and negative effects of globalization (highlighted in Thomas Friedman’s 2005 bestseller “The World is Flat”), the fact remains that enterprises today are dealing with customers, suppliers, partners, and competitors on a world-wide scale. These companies need more efficient ways to communicate, both internally and externally. Sending a California-based engineering manager to attend monthly staff meetings with the software team in Bangalore or having the regional manager visit each office to present the new sales plan is no longer considered a smart business practice by conferencing-savvy companies. Videoconferencing and collaboration products and services are helping large and small enterprises deal with the challenges of dispersed teams and global commerce by providing solutions for travel-free, anytime, anywhere rich media communications.
2. The Emergence of Virtual Businesses: Enterprises of the future will have even less of a physical “footprint” than they do today. Bricks and mortar are giving way to a dispersed workforce working from home, from remote offices, and shared office spaces. The virtual business needs better communications tools than the traditional building-based business in order to reduce human latency, speed decision making, and to build a sense of team spirit and belonging.
3. Continuous Video Improvement: Videoconferencing performance improves each year as new products roll out with advanced features, superior audio-video quality, and often lower prices. Recent examples include H.239/VGA connections for laptop-based collaboration, HD video, and wideband audio. Today’s HD videoconferencing systems finally provide the audio-video quality that users have long wished for.
4. Telepresence: Telepresence is an experience in which a videoconferencing system simulates an in-person meeting by providing life-size images and proper contextual positioning. The telepresence experience can be provided by a multi-codec system or by a standard videoconferencing system assuming that system is configured and installed with the right design elements. Telepresence has awakened many videoconferencing customers to the importance of room design and furniture placement. Future videoconferencing deployments will invoke telepresence concepts to provide customers with a far more pleasing experience, thereby driving adoption and ultimately more demand.
5. The “Big Boys” Factor: For most of the past decade, videoconferencing has been an application promoted by relatively small vendor companies. But over the past four years, large suppliers such as Cisco, HP, IBM, and Microsoft have been actively touting the benefits of unified communications, collaboration, and videoconferencing. One result has been a vast increase in business press coverage of visual collaboration solutions and their benefits. Another result is renewed attention on the part of CxOs and IT managers who are now rallying around unified communications, telepresence, and rich media solutions to increase business efficiency. Cisco, HP, IBM, and Microsoft are also suppliers trusted by enterprise IT professionals, the very same people who will be responsible for deploying next-generation collaboration and videoconferencing tools over the corporate network.
6. The Advent of Unified Communications: Many enterprise vendors, including Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Nortel, and Siemens, have been promoting the concept of Unified Communications (UC). UC is a collaborative communications environment that includes elements of presence, instant messaging, telephony, audio conferencing, data collaboration, unified messaging, mobility, and videoconferencing, all accessible through a single-client interface or via an interface embedded in another application. Most companies already have some or all of these individual capabilities within their organizations. Via partnerships with leading videoconferencing suppliers, the UC vendors are integrating video into UC at the same time that UC and its “click-to-call interface” is being integrated into office productivity tools and enterprise workflow. The huge impact UC brings, particularly for desktop video, is that video evolves from a stand-alone application to being a feature easily available in a unified client interface. This evolution will make video both easier to use and ubiquitous.
7. IP Networks: IP networks today have migrated from shared 10 Mbps technology to switched 100 Mbps (and even 1 Gbps) in the enterprise LAN. Network upgrades have been driven by the realization that connectivity has become mission critical, with many workers simply unable to do their jobs without an IP connection, and by enterprise migration to VoIP and an integrated communications infrastructure. For videoconferencing, IP promises higher bandwidths and faster, more reliable connections than were possible with ISDN. While guaranteeing quality of service (QoS) on an IP network remains a concern, several schemes such as MPLS and new bandwidth management solutions will help address these issues. Running mission-critical meetings on the mission-critical network is already a practice at many leading enterprises today and we expect it to be the norm in 3-5 years for most organizations.
The Internet itself is a key driver here, as this world-wide network enters into its next phase with support for real-time voice and video communications and collaboration. Web 2.0 technologies are promising new applications that will transform business models with increasing speed and that will further integrate video into business processes.
8. Mobility: The use of mobile devices and mobile networks has long been considered a trend that runs counter to the use of video. Videoconferencing has been associated with fixed devices in special rooms with wired connections. But we are entering the age of 3G wireless networks and mobile handsets that support video. While two-way interactive video calling from a mobile phone may be 5-10 years away from being commonplace, one-way video will be common in the 2-5 year picture, supporting a wide variety of customer service applications. With unified communications and video as a simple add-on, people on cell phones will be able to join a meeting via audio or video in a seamless fashion.
9. New Generation of Workers: There is no question that the new generation of workers coming into the workforce over the next 5-10 years will be much more video-savvy than their forbearers. Many current managers and executives are video-phobic, just as their predecessors were email- or voice mail-phobic. But time and experience will change everything. Next-gen enterprise knowledge workers will expect visual collaboration tools to be part of their everyday experience. Workers entering the workforce today have a growing interest in maintaining a work-life balance and in using tools that help them avoid unnecessary travel, be home for holidays and special family events, and yet maintain a connection with their colleagues and business partners. At the same time, many of these individuals have grown up in a culture of “always-on, always-connected.” UC, with and without its video enhancements, will be a natural application for many of these people.
Besides the technology and social issues described above that are driving enterprises towards the use of conferencing and collaboration solutions, there are political, environmental, and economic challenges that are pushing planners and decision makers in the same direction.
10. Disruptions to travel - man-made and natural calamities: Since 2001, business travel has lost what little glamour it had. Besides the indignity of standing in line to pass through a security screen in a partially undressed state and having personal grooming products confiscated while finding out their flight has been delayed, travelers are finding that airline services themselves have become less enjoyable, more stressful, and often downright unpleasant while becoming more costly at the same time. Videoconferencing as a replacement for business travel has never looked so good.
A travel-related calamity that would increase videoconferencing use would be the outbreak of some contagion whether from bio-terrorism, as a side-effect of global warming, or from some innocent person with a highly contagious disease traveling on an airplane. Any of these would motivate businesses to look to video as a way to conduct meetings without moving.
11. Rising costs of energy and macro-economic declines: The rising cost of energy will change the world economy. Right now the question concerning most businesses is how deep the recession will be and how long customers will pull back their buying patterns. Hence, the pressure to cut operating costs has never been greater, sometimes driven by a need to be competitive, and other times by a need to survive. Conferencing and collaboration solutions can step into this breach, helping customers improve internal collaboration as well as communications with customers while reducing overall costs. In addition, visual collaboration tools can enable enterprises to implement teleworker programs. Having employees work from remote or home offices while staying connected with their colleagues can have multiple benefits: lower consumption of automobile fuel, lower greenhouse gas emissions, improved work-life balance and employee morale, reduced need for office space and utilities. A separate issue is the possibility of a serious energy crunch whether initiated by economic, military, political, or other forces. In this event, either market forces (high prices) or government action (rationing) could force people to seek alternatives to all kinds of travel--local and long distance.
12. Climate change concerns: Concerns about climate change and global warming are growing every month. Organizations today are beginning to investigate their “carbon footprint” and look for ways to improve the situation. Using videoconferencing and other collaboration solutions allows any enterprise to be more eco-friendly at two levels: a reduction in long distance business travel (airplane emissions) and a reduction in local travel and local greenhouse gases (automotive) by reducing commuter traffic.
