Bridging the communication gap

By David Gladding

With the recent global financial meltdown, coupled with travel chaos arising from natural disasters, weather disruption and strikes, many financial institutions have made huge cutbacks in business travel. More and more of these organisations are turning to video and the web to bridge the communication gap in order to preserve the many benefits of face-to-face interaction and accelerate business velocity in the drive to recover from the economic slump as quickly as possible.

Besides the clear financial, eco and travel related considerations, web and video conferencing adoption will continue to grow as the need for users to communicate across global timelines increases. While video conferencing in the conference room will always be critical for team meetings, there is also considerable need for people to easily access the technology from their desktop and remote locations at their convenience, as inevitable personnel cutbacks have led to less people doing more work in the same amount of time.

Executives, for example, can meet more often with branch employees through use of video or web conferencing, rather than holding quarterly meetings in which managers and employees travel from place to place. Instead, meetings can be organised and held in a virtual instant. 

There has even been some discussion within the industry of video becoming the new phone. This has significant merit as up to 93 percent of communication is non-verbal in nature and if people have the ability to communicate face to face - it is usually preferable, especially when people are communicating in a second language. Expressions are better understood, confusion can quickly be addressed, and working relationships better maintained. 

Long since the days of choppy image quality and sound delays, video and web conferencing have made leaps and bounds over the last decade, thanks to advances in technology, infrastructure and service quality. Web cameras can now deliver clear and effective video at low price points and when combined with solutions, such as CMAD from Polycom, and Movi from Cisco/Tandberg, they allow the enterprise to enable video within organisations in an efficient, cost effective manner.

Innovation within the desktop video conferencing space has been tremendous over the past years; you only have to look at consumer adoption of Skype for evidence of the massive demand for people to communicate face-to-face. While it's true that Skype may not offer the levels of reliability and quality needed to support communications within a corporate environment, the fact that more and more people are using it within their own homes is a clear testament to where the market is headed.

The broad acceptance of video conferencing is being enabled significantly by manufacturers that have implemented ITU standards that reduce the bandwidth required to achieve crisp clear video.  Additionally, innovation in desktop technologies and improvement in the internet, as a viable transport medium for video signals, will continue to drive video as the standard for communication in the future.

Video conferencing is also forging ahead due to companies like ACT Conferencing offering a complete managed service from implementation to user support; after all, it is technology and technology isn't always perfect. With dedicated Service Assurance teams available to assist users around the clock or bookable video conferencing suites at a place near you, managed service providers make it even easier to take advantage of video communications if the resources are simply unavailable in-house.

From registration, pre and post-conference support as well as online billing, ACT makes the process simple for any organisation. Based purely on the cost benefits alone - not to mention ease of use, astonishing quality, immediacy and increased productivity - this is certainly the time to take advantage of video and web conferencing.

Biography

As Senior Director Global Sales for ACT Conferencing, David Gladding oversees direct and channel sales strategies globally. Gladding brings 19 years sales and sales management to the job, 11 with ACT. Prior to ACT, he served as General Manager at NYNEX and vice president of sales at AUSPED.