Andrew Davis and his team at Wainhouse Research will once again be leading our Video track at Enterprise Connect Orlando this year, and I've been reviewing some of Andrew's presentations. They've got loads of great information, including results from Wainhouse's most recent survey of video channel partners, which was especially enlightening.
Namely, the survey asked what the biggest challenge was for video adoption in the enterprise. The top answer, by far, was that "Customers are confused by the many options between video conferencing, web conferencing with video, and UC." The "poor macro-economic climate" rated a fairly distant second.
This makes some intuitive sense to me. An enterprise may have a UC tool like Microsoft Lync or Cisco Jabber, probably has some Polycom or Cisco/Tandberg systems in rooms around the enterprise, and users may have any number of video tools on their desktops (Skype) or mobile phones (FaceTime). How do you really decide, among all of those choices, the best way to standardize on a supporting video infrastructure--or whether such a standardized infrastructure is even the best way to go?
Another interesting note: Among the least-cited challenges was, "No customer demand or budget for videoconferencing or UC [emphasis added]." A related challenge, "Conveying the value of videoconferencing or UC to prospects," also received little endorsement by the channel partners.
The clear takeaway from these results is that the video market could take off, if the economy continues to improve and the vendors figure out how to sell the value proposition. Of course, these 2 conditions--especially the latter--are far from guaranteed. In particular, I don't see any particular reason to be optimistic that confusion over video systems and integration will be cleared up any time soon.
The vendors may not believe it's in their interest to keep the market confused, but they will naturally emphasize the types of video where their products are strongest, and de-emphasize areas where other vendors have an edge. The likely result of this diversity of approaches is confusion.
This might seem to be an opportunity for cloud-based video, from service providers who could specialize in hiding the complexity from the enterprise, and giving enterprises more flexiblity in where they integrate video with other technology within the enterprise.
Andrew's going to discuss these results as part of his session, Deploying Video on Mobile Devices: Some Do's and Don'ts
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