4 trends to watch out for in videoconferencing in 2013

Under the uncertain economic situation in Asia, companies in Hong Kong are trying every means to reduce cost and resources. Reducing travel costs and increasing efficiency and productivity by video collaboration is a key way businesses are doing this across the globe.

Unified communications (UC), open standard communications, mobility, cloud-based video collaboration were four top trends we identified as driving greater collaboration in 2012.

Here I take a deeper look at these trends and share my thoughts on what we can expect to see in 2013.

Unified communications (UC)
UC has reached mainstream adoption with approximately two thirds of businesses engaged or actively planning UC upgrades in 2012.

However, most organizations prioritize UC applications such as integrated messaging, conferencing, video, presence and IP telephony, but do not necessarily connect all UC applications into a UC framework at the same time.

In 2013, we shall see continued advancement in UC acceptance and adoption, as UC is a key factor in enabling real time connectivity and supporting multi-modal applications for anytime, anywhere, any devices communications.

Open standard communications
The Open Visual Communications Consortium was the first global visual communication exchange based on open standards linking service provider networks globally to deliver breakthrough video connectivity and interoperability, driving business-to-business (B2B) applications, and ushering in a new era of consumer visual communications. The consortium aims to deliver:

• Intercompany connectivity to accelerate the reach and value of customer investments in video and unified communication services and infrastructure and contribute to fair and equitable standards
• Establish guidelines for exchange expansion, and create acceptable performance criteria for all consortium members
• Preserve customer investment in multiple technologies that bring differentiated value for industry commercialization efforts

Mobile working
According to an IDC report last year, by 2013 1.2 billion people, one-third of the world’s total work force, will be mobile workers and 62% of them will be based in Asia.

Throughout the last year we have heard from a number of our customers that they are looking for mobile solutions to support the Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) trend and also for interoperable solutions. We expect the demand will continue this year.

Mobile solutions for BYOD
Customers want to adopt the BYOD policy and extend their enterprise video network beyond the traditional boundaries of the conference room to leading tablets with enterprise-class HD video solution.

By doing so, they can meet and collaborate face-to-face with anyone from anywhere—improving teamwork, collaborative decision-making, and productivity across and beyond the enterprise to customer and partner relationships.

Interoperability
Customers want the solutions to orchestrate interoperability across all of the elements in a communications environment including multiple solutions, vendors, networks, and connection protocols.

By doing so they will have the freedom to choose best-of-breed solutions for instant messaging, presence, call control, web conferencing, video collaboration and mobile, from any of hundreds of vendors with assurance that the solutions will seamlessly interoperate.

They will not only work with other contemporary systems, but also be backward-compatible with legacy investments and forward-compatible with new, emerging systems, applications, devices, networks, and protocols.

In terms of the services and products, cloud-based video collaboration is the area that we saw the biggest demand for last year.

Cloud-based on-premise service
The market is keen to have cloud-based on-premise video services in order to save costs. Hence, we see a huge growth in the demand for our cloud solutions, which are designed specifically for service providers to equip them with the carrier-grade infrastructure, endpoints and services they need to offer businesses of all sizes subscription-based solutions for video collaboration.

The offering for service providers is designed to accelerate the penetration and adoption of Polycom video collaboration solutions among SMBs and enterprises who want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand or a pure Video-as-a-service (VaaS).

With the rising popularity of social media platforms with both consumers and businesses, the market is expecting collaboration between enterprise-grade video experiences and the social networking sites.

To meet the demand, vendors need to allow customers to extend enterprise-grade video collaboration to users of Skype®, Facebook®, Google Talk™, as well as other business video applications via a browser for B2B and B2C videoconferencing with the highest quality, reliability and security.

The ability for people to collaborate and work together is mission-critical for any organization.

Beyond the enterprise, doctors meeting with patients, teachers meeting with students, government agencies meeting to respond to crises and deliver critical services to citizens are more productive when they are collaborative.

Across every industry, there is a need to transform how people collaborate—and in the process changing the face of industries from healthcare to education to government to financial services to manufacturing to entertainment.

The overall trend we’ll see is customers investing more in videoconferencing applications and a more flexible and customized application under a video cloud platform will be the big change in 2013.