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Video conferencing has seen significant growth over the past three years. Recent studies reveal that 90% of Fortune 500 companies use video systems, but this trend isn’t isolated to market leaders. The global video conferencing market is predicted to grow to $60bn by 2026. That’s a CAGR of 9.8% over the forecasted period.
Companies of all sizes are embracing the benefits of video conferencing. But this move isn’t as clean cut as overarching figures may suggest. Rather than whole companies adopting a video conferencing system wholesale, many are using multiple video conferencing apps. According to a recent study by Wainhouse, 62% of organisations use more than three video conferencing solutions which we know from speaking to our clients and partners, causes a host of issues for service owners.
A complex, multiplatform market
There are many factors behind this multiplatform video conferencing market. We’ve explored some of those in our millennial’s article. Millennial workers are one group who are driving future trends when looking at VC. Ultimately, millennials expect and demand smart workplaces, and as it stands, they make up over one third of the workforce. That includes things like huddle rooms and collaboration spaces. Research shows that 73% of millennials believe sharing tools are important in their day-to-day work. And 82% state that a tech savvy office would encourage them to take up a job offer.
Even if you are keen to adopt a VC culture, which means enabling the workforce with video comms equipment and apps, you’ll need to decide where to invest. The difficult part is that the market is complex. Multiple platforms are available, and there’s very little interoperability between them. While your millennials hop on something like Skype to chat with employees elsewhere, you may be paying to maintain a legacy system, and this could present several problems. Not least, the challenge of somehow integrating them to encourage adoption.
Global businesses
Ultimately, the world has been made smaller by technology. It doesn’t just mean that it’s easy to conduct business with people sitting at a desk thousands of miles away. It also allows companies to acquire businesses based remotely to themselves, open and sustain global offices, and work with partners across the world.
If each of these offices has its own VC solutions or solutions, in fact, this creates a messy comms template for an IT team to work with. And here we have it; the complicated VC marketplace in real terms. We find it surprising that 62% of organisations use more than three video conferencing solutions. The complexities are firmly in the remit of IT leaders. The added complication is that many video conferencing platforms try and keep you in a walled garden. And this makes integration between platforms a hugely challenging task.
Conclusion
The solution to these challenges starts with ensuring that users maintain their familiar workflows. Policies such as BYOD and adoption of integrated services (such as New Era Technology’s cloud collaboration solutions) give service owners the flexibility to build a user-friendly collaboration environment.
Users that just want a simple ‘big-green-button’ experience are catered for, and as those that wish to use their familiar tools can continue doing so. This reduces shadow-IT risks and ensures that investment in collaboration platforms is protected, by increasing user adoption and reducing issues.
It also creates a great deal of flexibility to accommodate growth as organisations grows, acquires new remote offices or has to connect with clients or partners using a different native VC or collaboration platform.
This improves business flow, and keep things familiar for staff wherever they are, without the need to push or train people on new platforms. Ultimately, users will engage and adopt the software they prefer using. And this is beneficial for the business as a whole.
More information
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