Everyone knows that mobile device use is exploding. In 2011, more smartphones and tablets will ship than PCs, according to Morgan Stanley. Video also is becoming the dominant form of communication on mobile devices--growing by more than 100% per year to make up more than 66% of mobile data traffic by 2015, according to Cisco's widely cited Visual Networking Index (VNI) Global Data Traffic Forecast. With this in mind, anyone looking to deploy any new video communications functionality in their enterprise better have mobile device support clearly in their sights.
Before getting into the details, the most important consideration to remember is this: Know what you are trying to accomplish! Too often people jump in with both feet and simply say "we need to support mobile devices." As we will see, that is a recipe for failure. Know what applications you are trying to enable and the business value behind them, and the result will be a much more successful deployment. Also, it is very important to consider the user experience prior to attempting to support certain applications. If your users cannot use it, or if it takes too much training, it will not be successful.
Then, keep in mind that users will want to both create and consume video with these devices, so it is important to consider both, since in many cases they will use different software to accomplish each task. And be aware that this is may be a moving target. For example, Adobe recently announced that they will no longer develop Flash Player for mobile devices. This has a huge impact on the way that many enterprises will roll out video streaming to Android and other non-iOS devices. We will consider this in detail in a future blog post.
To give an example of how users create and consume video in the consumer world, let's consider the iPad. The three things that people do the most with video on the iPad are:
1. Use Facetime to video conference with friends and relatives (and to a lesser extent, work colleagues)
2. Use the Camera app to record videos from the front and back cameras; they then play them back locally on the device using the same app and/or upload to YouTube or other video sharing sites
3. View streaming video from websites in HTML5 or in a specific app such as the YouTube app
As you can see, there are three different applications to do three different tasks.
Consumer usage is bleeding into the enterprise--affectionately known as the "consumerization of IT". Therefore, your users are going to want to do similar things in the enterprise. And, in the enterprise, there is one more thing to consider--Unified Communications. Unified Communications is extremely important and strategic for enterprises looking to roll out this functionality, so device support for the UC clients is very important as well.
In an ideal world, the UC client would provide all of the three applications listed above in a single app or web-based service. In practice, that is not the case today, and probably will not be for some time now. So enterprises will need to create a plan to support these applications on the different devices and will need to create a strategic plan that allows them to focus on:
1. Which devices to support
2. What applications to enable both short term and long term
3. How does Unified Communications fit into the mobile strategy, if at all
Let's consider each of these in detail:
1. Which devices to support--No one likes to do more work than they need to--especially overburdened IT staff. Therefore, it is unrealistic to try to support every mobile device that exists. Enterprises therefore need to take an inventory of what devices they have deployed today, what devices they plan to deploy in the future, and what their strategy is regarding BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).
Future support is a very key consideration, especially because you need to consider that it is going to take at least several months (if not longer, depending on the size of the organization) to roll out this functionality. So, if your organization still has a lot of Blackberrys, but your vendor says they are not going to support Blackberrys for three months, and you are going to take three months to roll out the services, and the organization plans to phase out the use of Blackberrys next year...well, you get the picture. It probably is not worth it.
In most cases, attempting to support video on older phones is a losing battle. So at a minimum, we would recommend sticking to SmartPhones and Tablets. For example, a good starting point might be:
• iPhone
• Android devices with OS 2.2 and higher
• iPads
For many organizations, those are reasonable choices that will cover the large majority of their users. And most of the vendors have solutions for these platforms today.
2. What applications to support-- This again comes back to "what am I really trying to accomplish?" Meaning--what are the business applications that you are trying to enable? What is the business value of what you are supporting? How are people going to interact with it--what is going to be the user experience? Will it be a useable system?
Since video conferencing typically has wider deployment in enterprises, organizations may be tempted to attempt to deploy this application first (this falls more into the create category as specified above). However, video conferencing has some unique deployment characteristics when delivered on mobile devices. For example, what is the extra traffic generated by all of these devices going to do to my network? Is the device going to be powerful enough to provide a good experience? Will users be able to properly hold the device for long periods of time? Do the participants sitting in the telepresence room really want to see and hear Bob at the airport? These are all important considerations and many of them have nothing to do with technology, but more about the experience.
When it comes to video consumption, in many cases this is easier to deploy than video conferencing, especially for on-demand content. For example, nearly all mobile devices can receive and play an .mp4 file via progressive download. Live video is more difficult since each endpoint has different capabilities to receive live video. Apple, for example, requires the video to be packaged as an HLS stream (HTTP Live Streaming). Still, it might be better to have remote mobile users participate in conferences in a "receive only" setting for large meetings and have the users receive a one way stream. On the other hand, for ad hoc one-on-one conferences, it may be better to allow users to participate in video conferences.
3. Unified Communications--For organizations in the planning stages or in the process of rolling out Unified Communications, mobile device consideration is a must. It is extremely important to work with your chosen vendor to understand their strategy and how that strategy may be able to help streamline your mobile device support strategy in the future. In an ideal world, your chosen vendor will 1) support all of the mobile platforms you want to support and 2) will support all of the applications you want to enable--both creation and consumption.
Unfortunately, this is not the case at this point. For example, while many of our clients are in the process of rolling out Lync implementations, Lync does not have a client for either iOS or Android today. So in the short term, you will need to choose other solutions. In the long term, try to influence your provider to support the devices you want to support.
Another short term option is to work with a provider that can help bridge the short term gap. For example, Blue Jeans Network provides a cloud-based service that allows users from different devices to interoperate--for example, Skype clients can call room systems. It also recently announced support for Lync clients on PCs. That means your mobile devices with Skype clients (iPhone, iPad, and Android all have Skype clients), for example, could call Lync PC clients.
What are your thoughts? What types of applications are you attempting to support on mobile devices? Which devices are you supporting?
In the next post, we will consider video conferencing providers' mobile support in more detail.
