Shift to Videoconferencing Emphasis for Unified Communications?

It’s hard to tell if the pattern develops on a broader basis, but there are some signs that videoconferencing and rich media collaboration are becoming something of a lead offer, for at least some suppliers and channel partners, in the unified communications space that broadly spans the business phone system, hosted communications and collaboration markets.

About 18 percent of U.K. businesses now use some form of videoconferencing, say researchers at Point Topic. Between March 2007 and May 2008, video conferencing use by business user in the United Kingdom has grown three percent overall, and Point Topic researchers say they were surprised that usage was that high.

Over the same time period, business use of VoIP has grown from 19 percent to 26 percent, Point Topic notes.

There seems to be a shift of language towards rich media in the unified communications space as well. Where last year some suppliers on industry panels were likely to be focusing on delivery innovations, such as hosted services, this year the language has shifted towards video-enabled communications.

That suggests some perceived shift in underlying buyer demand as well. And that would fit with surveys conducted by Wainhouse Research of channel partners in 2008 as well.

In a recent survey of 151 channel partners who tend to focus on conferencing and collaboration applications, Wainhouse Research found that although relative interest in many product categories was unchanged since late 2006, there was stronger movement in some directions.

Interest in “telepresence,” for example, grew 22 percent. Partner interest in “presence and instant messaging” grew 16 percent.

Meanwhile, interest in telephony and PBX systems grew 15 percent while interest in unified messaging grew 14 percent, according to Wainhouse Research.

Interest in integrating video with telephony systems was in fact only slightly stronger than integrating collaboration solutions with Microsoft Office Communications Server. About 83 percent of respondents were interested in video telephony, as opposed to 80 percent who indicated they were interested in OCS. Some 58 percent of respondents indicated they were interested in integrating collaboration solutions with Lotus Sametime.

Researchers at Point Topic suggest that what they consider a surprisingly-high percentage of business users citing conferencing as an application they use is explained by use of Web-based conferencing including Skype. Such relatively informal “video-enhanced” calls are not what many traditionally have referred to as “videoconferencing.”

But the trend demonstrates that an increasing number of people are using, and becoming used to, video communication for some of their meetings and conversations.

That inevitably will lead more users to upgrade to more-formalized rich media conferencing solutions, Point Topic believes.

And though “saving money” on travel costs is a frequently-cited advantage for rich media conferencing, ease of use is a crucial issue. To the extent that rich media sessions save time and money, some of those gains are offset by time wasted as participants wait to get each of the end user clients configured correctly.

“Conceptually, web conferencing is a technology that can easily transform physical meetings into online virtual meetings,” Wainhouse Research analysts say. “In order to do so, it introduces a layer of technology which, if not rock solid and easy to use, can add complexity and increase the potential for meetings not to occur on schedule.”

And that leads to Web conferences do not start on time, which in all reality increases costs by wasting the time of everyone in attendance.

About a quarter of survey respondents (25.6 percent) recently reported that Web conferences start more than five minutes late either “chronically” or “often.” That means more than half of all meetings are delayed more than five minutes on a routine basis.

The most-cited reason for meetings starting late is “technical difficulty” (34.1 percent), followed by “software download/install delays” (24.3 percent), “difficulty in figuring out how to join” (22.8 percent), and “missing materials/credentials” (13.9 percent).

Ease of use obviously is an issue here. Web conferencing client software downloads should require only one or two intuitive responses from the user, after which they should install and work, Wainhouse Research analysts say.

“Instructions on how to join a meeting can be very complex and require multiple steps, or made very easy by design,” they say.

The payoff would be substantial, as the combination of the three factors that can be mitigated through ‘ease of use’ practices is responsible for over three fifths of the Web conferences that start late.

“Web conferencing would be used for 33 percent more meetings if it were easier to use,” Wainhouse Research suggests. Almost half (46 percent) of respondents believe meeting usage would increase 20 percent to 30 percent more, while another third of respondents (34 percent) believe the increase in usage would be 50 percent or more, if Web conferencing were easier to use. IP