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Cultural barriers to video meetings vanishing says IDC
The use of video and telepresence for unified
communications and collaboration (UC&C) and
diminishing cultural barriers to video within
organisations will drive continued growth in
enterprise videoconferencing equipment sales in
EMEA this year, according to a new report by IDC
(
EMEA Videoconferencing Equipment 2011–2016
Forecast)
.
IDC forecasts videoconferencing equipment
revenues in EMEA to grow by 18.5% this year,
following a rise of 20.5% in 2011, and by 14.6%
throughout the forecast period.
Melissa Fremeijer, senior research analyst,
EMEA Unified Communications and Collaboration,
said that within the context of a more distributed
workforce and a global economy the business case
for videoconferencing had never been clearer.
“While the key driver for investing in
videoconferencing has initially been the need
to reduce travel costs, we find that increasingly
companies are interested in the benefits of
enhanced team collaboration and effectiveness of
meetings,” she said.
Video, argues IDC, is no longer a silo technology
used for face-to-face internal meetings, but is
increasingly being adopted as part of a UC&C
infrastructure and integrated into daily business
processes via built-in and customisable applications.
www.idc.com
Visual collaboration on
the up
Frost & Sullivan, too, is highlighting
increased use of visual collaboration,
albeit from a low base: in its recent
study of more than 100 European
businesses, nearly half of those
surveyed said they spend less than 5%
of their IT and communications (ICT)
budget on visual collaboration.
Research Analyst Karolina Olszewska
said: “Visual collaboration is most widely
used for internal staff communication,
product development and product training
and demonstration. For situations that
require diplomacy and confidentiality,
such as contract negotiations, customer
presentations and HR, standard face-to-
face meetings are preferred.”
Face-to-face is still viewed as the most
beneficial meeting method, followed
closely by visual collaboration and then
more traditional options, such as audio and
web conferencing.
The study,
Users’ Experiences with
Visual Collaboration Products and Services
in the Business Context
, found that 58% of
standard face-to-face meetings occur daily,
while 27% of meetings that makes use of
visual collaboration take place less than
once a month.
Even so, 10% of respondents already
deploy visual collaboration on a daily basis
and more than three quarters (78%) expect
its use in their organisations to rise in 2012.
www.conferencing.frost.com
Collaboration made easy
Mitel has brought out a new touchscreen video-
enabled phone for personal use and small
meeting rooms. Combining multi-party HD video
and audio with presentation display and document
sharing capabilities, the UC360 was created
in response to demand for easy-to-use, cost-
effective tools that make workplace collaboration
a spontaneous, natural part of the working day.
The Mitel UC 360 is compatible with leading video
collaboration, telepresence, audio conferencing
and IP-PBX solutions.
www.mitel.com/
UC360
Video moves to the desktop
Video is moving to the desktop as new devices
like Yealink’s VP530 HD executive handset offer
features previously only available on room systems.
In the case of the VP350, these include three-way
video-conferencing; a directory search engine
that cuts the number of touches needed to find a
contact and make a call to just four; and an Open
API for integration with business applications.
www.yealink.co.uk/video-gallery.
Security fears
Security fears are stopping four out of five
businesses from using the cloud services they
want, according to research conducted by
Varonis Systems Inc.. The data governance
software provider found that 80% of
companies ban employees from using cloud-
based file synchronisation services, but 70%
would use them if they were as robust as
internal tools. To stem the tide of enterprise
files spilling onto external servers and devices,
59% of organisations use a combination of
policy and blocking: 20% rely on policy alone.
One fifth of companies do nothing to prevent
staff from accessing file synchronisation tools,
leaving employees free to take confidential
data outside the company.
http://hub.varonis.com/BYOSSurvey
www.varonis.com
Private clouds on the rise
IDC expects the western European private
cloud market to grow to $7.9 billion in 2016
at a CAGR of 23.2% as businesses aim to cut
costs, improve efficiency and become more
flexible. Its first study of the private cloud
sector –
Western European Dedicated Private
Cloud. Hardware, Software, Networking and
Services
– identifies growing interest in pre-
packaged private clouds (inc. servers, storage,
network and management) as they speed up
implementation and overcome concerns about
security, compliance and data location that act
as barriers to public cloud adoption.
www.idc.com
Migration delayed
Nearly one in four (23%) Chief Information
Officers and IT directors has no plans to
migrate IT systems to the cloud. A survey by
Robert Half Technology found that the biggest
barriers to the adoption of cloud technology
are security (cited by 46% of respondents);
continuity of service (36%); data integrity
(32%); speed of service (31%); cost (30%); and
lack of in-house knowledge (24%). Functions
most likely to be moved to the cloud are
storage (37%); data centres (28%); servers
(27%); applications such as CRM (26%); and
software development (18%).
www.roberthalf.co.uk
BTWi-Fi
BT is uniting BT Fon and BT Openzone services
under the BTWi-fi brand to make it easier for
business and consumer broadband customers, who
have free access to BT’s network, to find a hotspot
and get online. BT’s network is made up of more
than six million hotspots in more than 100 countries
www.btwifi.com
In Brief...
Mitel UC 360
Yealink VP530