Video conferencing comes of age

With the recent global financial meltdown, coupled with the travel chaos arising from natural disasters, weather disruption and strikes, many financial institutions have made huge cutbacks in business travel.

Accelerating business velocity has naturally come to the top of the corporate agenda, especially in the financial sector, where organisations are looking to recover from the economic slump as quickly as possible.  Video conferencing will inevitably play a part, as people can conference or work remotely instead of travelling, which leads to more efficiency, productivity and, of course, addresses the need for businesses to stay connected 24x7.

While it’s fair to predict that video conferencing adoption will continue to rise over the years as businesses become more environmentally and budget conscious; equally, with all the uncertainty surrounding travel these days, more and more companies will turn to video to bridge the communication gap in order to preserve the many benefits of face-to-face interaction. 

Where the financial services industry has truly globalised, many key players are participating in meetings at all hours of the day and want the ability to securely join via video conference.  With today’s desktop video solutions, such as CMAD and Movi, participants now have the ability to join from home as opposed to commuting into an office.  With ACT’s bridging services, for example, remote participants are able to join conferences within financial institutions securely through a combination of public Internet connection to the service and then secure ISDN connection into the institution.

If you ask most people today, they would probably associate video conferencing with flashy board rooms and expensive kit.  While this may be true of financial organisations who can justify the expense by cost savings on not having to fly directors first class across the world for short presentations, it is not necessarily an accurate depiction of the market, or indeed the future of video conferencing.

Besides the clear financial, eco and travel related considerations, video conferencing adoption will continue to grow as the drive towards ubiquitous access and connectivity and the need for users to communicate across global timelines become more prevalent. 

Ubiquitous access relates to the ability for a user to be able to have access to a video conferencing system any time that there is a need to communicate, regardless of location.  While video conferencing in the conference room will always be critical for team meetings, there is also considerable need for people to access the technology from their desktop and remote locations.

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 held and organised 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% of communication is non-verbal in nature and if people have the ability to communicate face to face, it is usually preferable. Expressions are better understood, confusion can quickly be addressed, especially in cases where a second language is being used, and working relationships better maintained. 

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

At the most basic level, innovation and adoption within the desktop video conferencing space has been tremendous over the past years and will be a key driver to adoption in the future.  Furthermore, consumer acceptance of Skype is 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.

Ubiquity also relates to the ability of video conferencing users to connect with the same reach and robustness traditionally experienced with the public switched telephone networks.  Currently, the Internet delivers the ubiquitous connectivity required by the mobile and remote worker, although it does not have an ability to prioritise video conferencing traffic over other traffic such as email and data. 

The future of video conferencing and broad adoption is being enabled significantly by manufacturers that have implemented ITU standards that reduce the bandwidth required to achieve crisp clear video, such as the H.264 standard and annexes for High Profile and SVC.  Additionally, innovation in desktop technologies and improvement in the viability of the Internet, as a ubiquitous 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, ACT makes it even easier to take advantage of video communications if the resources are simply unavailable in-house.  From registration and pre- to post-conference support and online billing, ACT makes the process simple for any organisation. 

And for those with a flair for all things hi-tech, as 3D TVs become available this year, we’ll certainly see 3D holographic projection, as opposed to simple video streaming, as the technology advances and production costs become more feasible.  Imagine sitting around a boardroom table surrounded by holographic projections of colleagues from across the globe.

Well, maybe that’s gazing too far into the future; but purely on the cost benefits alone—not to mention ease of use, astonishing quality and immediacy—this certainly is the time to take advantage of video conferencing.