Video collaboration: a vision for driving the next big wave of collaboration

It’s a startling number to fathom but this is where we’re headed: 90% of internet traffic will be in video form by 2013. Think about it. That’s a ton of YouTube views, a whole lot of Cisco TelePresence and WebEx meetings, scads of Skype chats, and heaps of online TV and movies.

How did we get here? Well, video communication and collaboration is where we’ve been headed for a while – as businesses and as consumers – even if we didn’t quite know it ten or 20 years ago. A picture, it’s said, is worth a thousand words. That’s because, at our core, we’re visual creatures – we respond better and retain more when we see rather than read words on a page or on a screen.

 But it’s still taken some time for the technology to catch up to where we wanted to be. So we emailed and texted and tweeted and called (remember landlines?) because that’s what the technology and bandwidth capacity allowed. If video killed the radio star back in the 1980s, you might say a new kind of video did a bang-up job of slowing down network capacity throughout the 2000s. 

 Video collaboration’s day finally arrives.

But then things started to change in a big way.  The internet enabled digital communications on an unprecedented scale and we figured out how to digitize audio and video. Bandwidth increased (and continues to increase) and ultimately, it didn’t hurt video’s ascendance that in the economic slowdown travel – planes, trains and automobiles – simply got too expensive to be practical day to day.

 The pump was primed for an explosion in enterprise video collaboration and the technology and tools finally caught up. And while cost-cutting drove the first wave of video conferencing, it lead to the realization that the benefits of real-time, face-to-face video collaboration could no longer be ignored:

• Strengthened productivity
• Reduced costs
• Improved relationships between external partners and internal teams
• Ability to scale increasingly scarce resources
• Reduced carbon footprint

 Who can deliver on integrated video collaboration?

But while the technology now existed and the promise of video collaboration seemed within reach, there needed to be an integrated secure architecture that enabled real-time collaboration anywhere, with any content, on any operating system and on any device. [Read more...]