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No Jitter Research: 2018 Video Collaboration Survey

  • Whether in corporate conference rooms, at their desktops, or via mobile apps, many business users are becoming increasingly comfortable communicating and collaborating over video. But just how pervasive is this trend, what does the modern video estate look like within the enterprise, and what are the biggest benefits and challenges enterprises are encountering as they video-enable more and more of their workforces? For insight on these and other questions, we turned to our No Jitter and Enterprise Connect enterprise IT communities. Click through this slideshow and discover what we learned in our inaugural video collaboration survey.

  • Uptake & Importance
    In fielding our 2018 Video Collaboration Survey, No Jitter sought out enterprise IT professionals who are responsible, either as individuals or as part of a team, for evaluating technology or making strategic technology decisions for their enterprise organizations. Of total respondents, 142 individuals met that criteria, half working at large enterprises with 1,000 or more employees. Among all enterprise IT respondents, 82% indicated support for video collaboration -- with an even larger percentage of respondents at large companies (88%) supporting video collaboration technologies.

    This isn't just a nice to have, either. Nearly 85% of respondents said they consider this technology to be important, with 57% characterizing it as highly or somewhat highly important. On the flip side, 15% of respondents signaled that video collaboration is only somewhat or not at all important for their organizations' users.

  • Usage
    While video collaboration has gained a foothold in the enterprise, it's far from fully entrenched, our survey results show. When asked to consider the employee population within their organizations, only 11% of respondents said all potential users of video collaboration are engaging with the technology on a regular – i.e., at least once a week – basis. Not surprisingly, this percentage drops to 5% when looking at large enterprises. Half of respondents report that fewer than half of the potential video collaboration user base taps into the technology on a regular basis. This is a situation that respondents overwhelmingly see changing over the next year; 87% of respondents said they expect the number of regular users to grow within their enterprises within the next 12 months.

  • Posture
    For the most part, survey respondents see video as one piece of a multifaceted enterprise communications and collaboration portfolio, even if used minimally within their organizations for select use cases (as suggested in write-in responses, for instance, quarterly reviews, product design, and client meetings). One-fifth of respondents, however, acknowledged that their organizations are building up their infrastructures and/or adopting cloud video services with a goal of making video a primary communications mode.

  • Here, There, Everywhere
    When enterprises think of video collaboration, it's with worldwide connectivity in mind – as shown above, two-thirds of respondent organizations support video meetings globally. With that reach comes large numbers of rooms; 28% of respondents, for example, said they have more than 100 video meeting rooms at their organizations, with roughly the same percentage of respondents pegging the number of video-enabled spaces at their companies at between 10 and 49.

  • Capabilities & Device Types: What's Supported
    Of eight specific options, shown above, desktop-to-desktop online meetings, conferencing/collaboration among room and desktop participants, and conferencing/collaboration among room systems are well supported across most respondent organizations (by upwards of 80% of respondent organizations). Not surprisingly, desktops and room systems are the most commonly supported device types among respondent organizations. At 96%, nearly all respondents said they support video collaboration on laptops and desktops, while 85% have room systems in use, as well. Here's a percentage breakdown for other device types:

    • Mobile phones -- 73%
    • Tablets -- 69%
    • Video phones -- 33%
    • Interactive displays -- 35%
    • Video walls -- 23%
  • Where Video Meetings Take Place
    Given the heavy support for video collaboration desktop to desktop, among desktop and room participants, and room to room (as shown on the preceding slide), that most video meetings at respondent organizations are taking place in formal conference rooms or at user desktops is to be expected. What's surprising, however, is that only 7% of video meetings are taking place in huddle spaces (for about two to eight people), even though 65% of respondents said their organizations have such spaces available. Perhaps this is attributable to another survey data point: 60% of respondents said at least half of all meetings are scheduled in advance rather than taking place on the fly.

  • Room Breakdown
    Corporate meeting rooms come in all shapes and sizes -- and while the basic conference room, of varying size, is most widely available, there are plenty of organizations that offer huddle spaces, as well.

  • Deployment Model
    As in so many modes of communications and collaboration, the cloud model appears to be edging out use of legacy approaches. In our survey, just about one-quarter of respondents said their organizations' primary deployment model is traditional on-premises in-room systems connected via the enterprise network for scheduled meetings. The majority of respondents rely most heavily on some sort of cloud offering -- also known as video as a service (VaaS) or video conferencing as a service (VCaaS) -- or a cloud service plus in-room systems for a hybrid model, as shown above.

  • VaaS Perspective
    Taking a deeper dive into cloud video services, we found that most respondents who said their organizations already are using VaaS consider the technology to be increasingly important if not a critical enabler for them. As another indication of importance, 85% of those using VaaS today are doing so on a subscription basis rather than in a freemium model.

Video communications and collaboration by the numbers