Provider of unified visual communications solutions Avistar Communications has announced its annual list of trends that is expected to “significantly” impact the videoconferencing sector in the coming year.
The company said that businesses will continue to see the high value of videoconferencing. Company officials said that personal videoconferencing will become an essential method of improving collaboration and productivity.
Moreover, the company predicts that as companies embrace new delivery methods, there will be continued growth in virtual environments such as virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and cloud-based services.
Company officials said that the trends are all driven by the need to increase productivity, decrease operating costs and leverage business assets in a real-time and collaborative business environment.
As per the annual list of trends, videoconferencing will continue to be virtually everywhere; the speed of change is increasing; consumerization of technology continues to drive business adoption; BYOD will go mainstream; videoconferencing solutions need to get along and play nicely; and the bandwidth on the run.
Company officials said that businesses have embraced cloud computing and the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to improve workforce collaboration, control costs and deliver software tools that are essential to improved employee productivity, regardless of location or device.
The company’s trend noted that the next phase is on-demand videoconferencing cloud- and VDI-enabled services that are available to any business, delivered via infrastructure, network and application service providers.
According to the company, over the past three years, the industry has moved from hardware-based conference room solutions to software-only videoconferencing on laptops to conducting calls on tablets.
In the coming year, this rate of change is expected to continue and price/performance ratios will improve. Company officials said that this will be driven by the cloud and increased connectivity on all sorts of devices.
In order to take advantage of the rapid change -- and to be able to rapidly change -- companies should seek out videoconferencing solutions that take an all-software approach, according to the company.
The company’s trend also predicted that enterprise apps such as business-class videoconferencing will continue to become more user-friendly as well as they’ll deliver secure and scalable videoconferencing capabilities that are built to meet business needs.
Today, employees are expected to “Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD)” and have them sync with their corporate technology. Company officials said that this means that IT departments must support Windows, iOS, Mac, Android and Linux devices and machines. Plus, companies must select cross-platform solutions that can be securely delivered.
Company officials said that videoconferencing solutions that can cost-effectively break down the interoperability barriers will emerge as important unifying strategies and find quicker paths to adoption on a broad basis.
Moreover, companies need to select communications solutions that provide robust bandwidth management, call admission control, user policy support, threshold and utilization modeling, as well as extensive reporting and forecasting capabilities, according to company officials.
“Businesses in 2012 want anytime, anywhere videoconferencing that works with any device, that can be delivered securely and that will not negatively impact their networks. CFOs want solutions that are economical with a proven ROI, while CEOs and COOs want enhanced productivity and creativity,” said Stephen Epstein (News - Alert), CMO at Avistar.
Epstein said that with the convergence and availability of all these technologies, 2012 certainly will emerge as an important year for the videoconferencing industry and businesses alike.
Earlier last month, Avistar (News - Alert) announced that Avistar C3 (News - Alert) Conference, an advanced conferencing and collaboration solution, will offer cloud-ready, HD-quality, multiparty videoconferencing at a much lower cost of similarly sized hardware-based multipoint control units (MCU).
Anshu Shrivastava is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anshu’s articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Chris DiMarco