Sheila McGee-Smith did a post last week on a recent study done by Cisco's IBSG (Internet Business Solutions Group), an internal strategy consulting group. The headline and main takeaway from this study, which Sheila covered, related to the idea of the "mobile cloud," i.e., the potential for mobility services and functionality to reside in the cloud. But Cisco also provided a wealth of data from the survey that gives a pretty detailed look at what mobile customers are doing with their smartphones, what they'd like to be doing, and how consumer uses and users differ from those devoted to business.
Just to take one interesting slice of the research, I want to look at some of the responses Cisco got when they asked about use of video on mobile phones. They surveyed both consumers and business users for the research, and found some gaps between the two classes of users, as you'd expect. One was in the desire to use video conferencing on mobiles: About half the business users said they'd be interested in this application, while less than 40% of consumers did. More popular activities were email, online shopping, and social network updates.
Asked what apps they currently use on mobiles, almost 40% of business users said they do video calls, while consumers were less than 20%. Recording and watching videos rated higher, above the 50% range, for both consumers and business users. Within the next two years, more than 80% in both categories of user expect to be recording and watching videos on their mobile phones.
Mobile video conferencing is poised for significant overall growth in this two-year time frame, according to Cisco's survey, increasing from less than a quarter of users now to more than three-quarters in 2 years. Since the earlier question showed mobile video conferencing skewing toward a business user base, this is definitely an issue that enterprise network managers will want to keep a close eye on.
The big question for enterprise managers is: Assuming these user expectations are borne out, will this additional videoconferencing traffic affect the enterprise network? Clearly, people seem to adopt communications applications much more quickly on mobile devices than on enterprise systems—sometimes because the feature isn't available in your decade-old PBX, sometimes because people don't use functions that may be available even on a newer system. Will people who shun everyday use of desktop video on installed Microsoft OCS systems be the same individuals who do make video calls on their mobiles on a regular basis? And if they do make mobile video calls, will those calls mostly be to other mobile users—in other words, entirely off the enterprise grid? Or will mobile-to-desktop video calls load up enterprise networks and create problems for performance?
Finally, will people tolerate the kind of video performance on their mobiles that they tolerate when it comes to voice? I find it hard to believe that anyone will put up with video calling that looks as bad as many cellular calls sound. I know 4G is supposed to solve this, and maybe it will—maybe.
On the consumer side, we hear about the possibility for video-enabling contact centers, but the Cisco research left me with the impression that consumer real-time interactive mobile video will not take off as quickly in the near term, so this is likely to be a niche function, at most, for contact centers.
If Cisco's survey is right, mobile interactive video is coming—the task now is to figure out what exactly that will entail.
