ONLINE CONFERENCING: AN EMERGING MARKET TREND AS IP ENTHUSIASTS START WORK
Add together an increasingly distributed workforce, the ‘green issues’ surrounding business travel and the growing number of employees who have grown up using video technologies via the internet and 3G mobiles to communicate and network socially – and what’s the net result?
An emerging market trend that could mean important new opportunities for Communications Providers who can offer their business customers fast, simple and affordable ways to hold meetings through the medium of the screen.
SEE ME, HEAR ME
This opinion is the view of a recent whitepaper* from business and IT analysts Quocirca. It highlights the vital importance that visual contact continues to play for many people in negotiations between customers and their suppliers and in collaboration between colleagues, even though email and the phone are generally now the primary methods of communication.
Not long ago the main driver for deciding to buy into any form of ‘videoconferencing’ was to avoid the considerable financial and time costs of getting people to and from meetings. Now environmental pressures and the increasingly urgent need to reduce the corporate carbon footprint are adding weight to the wisdom of this kind of decision.
MORE THAN JUST SAVING ON TRAVEL
But Quocirca’s survey also finds that companies who have already invested in collaborative conferencing solutions – such as web conferencing and file sharing techniques plus the fast, high quality broadband links needed to carry them – are seeing their main ROI in the increased productivity of their people. This is in addition to the travel cost savings they had anticipated.
The growth in the routine use of video in business transactions will also be facilitated by two new factors. The first is the arrival of 21
st Century Network (21CN), bringing even higher bandwidths and simpler technology interoperability. The second is the entry into the working population of what Quocirca’s whitepaper refers to as ‘the IP generation’.
These are the 18-24-year-olds that Ofcom** has discovered are far ahead of other UK age groups in their enthusiasm for viewing video digital content, as well as for generating their own for sites such as YouTube and MyFace.
Seventy seven per cent of this cohort of young adults perhaps unsurprisingly download or watch music videos, but 60% also favour watching TV programmes online.
For them – like no previous generation – the concept of interacting and communicating effectively with others through the medium of a computer, plasma or mobile screen is as familiar and as natural as picking up the phone.
* "Visual Impact: the emerging face of business collaboration". Available for download free from www.quocirca.com
** "The International Communications Market 2006" (published November 2006). Available at www.ofcom.org.uk
BT Wholesale can deliver the essential IP infrastructure your business customers to need to run online conferencing applications.
Our stable, robust and fast broadband network can supply the upstream and downstream speeds necessary for advanced high bandwidth applications such as videoconferencing. This means you could gain the market edge by starting to formulate online conferencing propositions and solutions for your customers now.
Looking to the future, the next phase in the roll-out of 21CN in 2008 – with its prospect of broadband speeds of up to 24MB – could equip you to capitalise even further on new revenue generation opportunities, as demand for videoconferencing and other content rich multi-media applications grows.