Four years ago, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com, was reported in Forbes magazine saying, “In seven to ten years, video traffic on the internet will exceed data and voice traffic combined.”
At the time these were visionary words, now with the passage of time the forecast is looking exceedingly more likely. Availability of high-speed broadband connections is now enabling businesses and consumers to communicate by video from home, office or from a variety of remote locations such as hotels, libraries, internet cafes, airports and free WiFi networks.
This availability and access to video by broadband is being matched by demand for such services as teams become ever more dispersed, a fact borne out by a recent Harvard Business Review survey of best practice. In it, they found that:
· less than four per cent of teams reported ever meeting with all their fellow team members face-to-face;
· almost 66 per cent of teams included people from at least three time zones
· and just over 75 per cent reported members from more than one country.
Now, while most small to micro-sized companies don't face the same challenges, converged communications and video still have a part to play. Scale does come into it, but with the right solution Video over IP communications can enhance teamwork, productivity and efficiently significantly. It is easy to see the advantages of integrating video with web presence, instant messaging, voice communications, data sharing and collaboration to have a 360 degree overview of your business.
Broadband, of course, has played a major part in driving the growth in video communications. The lesson from the corporates is that the greatest benefits accruing from IP-based conferencing systems are in productivity, teamwork and efficiciency increases.
For instance, contacting a colleague by Voice or Video over IP is faster than picking up a landline handset. The connection is instantaneous and involves no more than a click, allowing geographically diverse teams to work together better and faster.
Executives and managers with hectic diaries can now, almost literally, be in two or more places at once. Desktop conferencing systems allow busy team members to dip in and out of meetings without leaving their desks, making it possible to attend several meetings in diverse locations in one day. This remote flexibility helps hugely in bringing together the right people at the right time and ensuring each meeting is as productive as possible.
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