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Business Video – Much More than a Broadcast

It’s not uncommon for most people online to watch one or more videos in the course of their day. Watching video has become a standard and common Internet experience. Most of you are probably familiar with YouTube – unarguably one of the most popular places to find and share videos online. But, video is not just for public use and it’s no longer only a one-way, broadcast experience.

New solutions are offering many different ways to use interactive one-to-one or one-to-many experiences that enable the back and forth communication of conversations and collaboration that enhance the ways in which you do business. In fact, Cisco predicts that, in the next 3 years, over 90% of Internet traffic will be video. Therefore it makes sense to consider how video can improve business interactions for your company.

Consider the following uses and benefits of business video:

Meetings: With WebEx, you can use your company’s executive talent to best advantage by enabling them to participate in meetings and events from remote locations. The experience with WebEx transforms the experience from the conference calls where participants are heard, but not seen. In a meeting using WebEx, you see the people in your meeting, speak with them and share documents, slide decks and other materials used to facilitate the conversation—all through using computers and even smartphones to stream live video.

This interactive, live experience provides a powerful way to interact with a few people, or many—without the cost or logistics of travel. You’ll also find that projects are completed faster and better.

Organizational Communications: As more companies embrace mobility, workforces become distributed across a variety of locations, making it more difficult to have company-wide meetings that keep everyone up to date on the latest company strategies and objectives.

Cisco Show and Share enables your company to establish a private community where users can easily create, edit and upload videos to share with those who need to see, hear and understand the communications. Transcripts can be easily displayed, enabling people to search for and interact with the specific part of a communication that applies to them. Within that segment of the video, they can add feedback and notes to expand and clarify the meaning and intention as they work together to collaborate on how to best meet stated objectives.

Training and Professional Development: As the markets we work in expand and change, companies that invest in the continuous training and evolution of their workforces will reap the most benefits. That used to mean sending people off to training courses and taking them out of the workforce for the duration, resulting in increased costs for providing professional development.

Now this education can be facilitated through a live or archived session on WebEx, or within your Show and Share community. The Internet has driven our ability to self-educate. Now, you can provide the highest level of education to keep your talent in step with innovations by allowing them to access and participate in training from wherever they may be, on any device.

The Time for Business Video is Now

Video is becoming an important part of our communication. As humans, we have an overwhelming need to see and hear and interact with others while conducting business. Trust and credibility are built much faster when you have the ability to put people in the “room” together.

It’s also important to note just how easy the technology to create video has become. From simple to use, handheld Flip video cameras to looking into the video cameras built into our laptops, smartphones and tablets, it’s never been easier to create, use, and stream video to facilitate the interactive experiences that drive successful business outcomes.

Unified Communications – The Platform for Change

The new normal for businesses today—from SMB to enterprise concerns—includes information overwhelm, national or even global value chains and escalating market competition. The traditional ways of doing things are no longer capable of producing the results our companies need to maintain competitive advantage. In a world driven by knowledge and interactions, it’s time to consider the advantages of unified communications as a platform to embrace change.

Does your company need to:

• Connect employees, customers, suppliers and partners with a wide variety of information and each other—accessible in real time?


• Provide access to critical business information to an increasingly mobile workforce?


• Improve workforce productivity just to keep up with day-to-day tasks?


• Identify and quickly locate experts for customer issue resolution or project completion?


• Communicate effectively and efficiently between different office locations?


• Reduce travel for key executives to reduce downtime?

Collaboration is most effective when enabled by a multi-layered approach that provides the right tools for sharing information and communicating more efficiently. Depending upon how you define your organization’s need for collaboration, you may not have considered unified communications as the right option for you. But, in reality, it could be just exactly what you need.

Unified communications can be implemented iteratively so that you harness what you need as you need it. Consider for example if your definition of collaboration is restricted to information access. Using a file server approach may have worked fine in the past, but it likely doesn’t do so well as your workforce becomes more mobile and needs to access that information from a variety of means, such as a web interface, a client application or a mobile device. Unified communications can answer that need with less overhead than trying to modify your file server approach.

Or, perhaps your company considers collaborative tools as the answer for managing your employee’s time. If this were the case, you may have focused on a calendaring system that includes contacts and task management. But, just accommodating scheduling will not improve employee efficiency to the point that you’ve maximized benefits to the business.

Consider instead that presence enables your company to locate the best available expert at the exact time they can provide value. Instant messaging can reduce the time spent on meetings when a simple question and answer session can speed time to task completion. And, video conferencing can elevate the quality of meeting productiveness.

However you’ve approached collaboration in the past may be leaving healthy benefits on the table that can transform what you thought of as the best approach. You can add the services and tools as your needs evolve without reinventing the wheel each time some new capability becomes a requirement rather than a nice to have.

Those are only a few examples of how unified communications can serve as a platform for change. Don’t you think that perhaps it’s time for you to reconsider how you’re defining collaboration to make sure that you’re getting the optimal results for your company?

How Video Conferencing Impacts Your Sales Process

Whether you’re a small, mid-size or enterprise business, video conferencing can transform the way your sales team gets the job done. Sure, it reduces travel costs without removing “face-to-face” interactions with your customers, but there are also other benefits such as active training on new product releases and shortening sales cycles.

But, don’t take our word for it. Take a look at how companies are incorporating Cisco’s WebEx video to improve their sales processes.

Imagine being able to pull your salespeople off the streets for a couple of hours, train them on new products or services and have them out on the street selling the new offering that afternoon.

What impact would shaving 25% off the length of your sales cycle have on your company’s growth objectives?

In addition to impacting your sales process, the flexibility of a video conferencing solution can accommodate situations that range from 1-on-1 collaborative work sessions that put remote workers “in the same room” to facilitating your annual sales meeting and user forums. 

Whichever way you slice it, the benefits of video conferencing are definitely worth considering. That you can have WebEx up and running across your organization within several weeks makes the opportunity even more compelling – and the ROI faster.

SMBs Reap Collaboration Benefits through Consolidation

It’s more than likely that your workforce has clamored for applications that enable them to more readily connect with colleagues, customers and partners. Even for small and mid-size companies with less than 1,000 employees, this can mean you’ve implemented a variety of tools in an ad hoc fashion just to keep business moving. If this is your situation, you may find the time and cost your staff is expending to maintain these siloed solutions is too high. You will also discover that an isolated array of distinct tools isn’t delivering the optimal impact to business performance that a unified system could.

Deploying a unified communications (UC) system provides SMBs access to a selection of performance-related tools that work together to allow them to compete on a larger scale without inflating costs. With intuitive collaboration capabilities only a click away, small and mid-size organizations can effectively level the playing field and create competitive advantages.

The most obvious advantage of deploying UC is meeting end user demands for advanced communications capabilities with a standardized system implementation that reduces demand on support and maintenance resources. Your total cost of ownership will be lower, not just due to the reduction of time and maintenance, but to the VMware virtualization technologies that consolidate multiple, integrated applications onto a single server with the Cisco Unified Communications Manager Business Edition 6000.

All of this said, the true value to your organization comes with the advanced collaboration capabilities that UC system provides.

A full suite of UC capabilities is available, including an impromptu conferencing application, presence status, instant messaging, click to dial, speech recognition voicemail and advanced mobility (such as single number reach). You remain in control with the flexibility to decide the array of the tools your business deploys and when you do so. UC is a lot more than a VoIP telephony solution.

Smaller companies are often challenged by limitations in staff availability that increase delays to decisions while workers wait for access to expertise. This can also impact their ability to serve customers as well as the ability to scale the business on demand to take advantage of a swiftly changing market conditions.

By shifting the way in which you deploy communications, the ability to create richer, on-demand experiences that improve business outcomes becomes a standard, not an exception.

Consider the following opportunities that consolidating your communication tools into a unified system can present to increase your business velocity:

• Presence allows people to discover who potentially has the information they need and indicate the best way to connect with them. This eliminates the phone and email tag that stops productivity in its tracks. If one person is not available, an alternative choice can be made to keep your workflows in motion.
  
  
• Escalation with a click introduces best practices for streamlining information exchanges. As an example, the ability to get brief answers to questions is facilitated by instant messaging but should a longer discussion be requires, the session can be converted to a phone call with a click.
  
  
• Face-to-Face is still the gold standard for the most effective communications. The difference in today’s business environment is that this experience is no longer defined by who’s physically in the room with you. Video conferencing makes face-to-face conversations the new normal to keep your business momentum up to speed regardless of where your workforce, partners, suppliers or customers may be. 

Consolidation is doing more with less. Collaboration is doing more with more. A unified communications system could be your answer to both of those needs. Integrated communications tools enable small and mid-sized companies to work intuitively and move at the speed of business, reaping productivity, performance and financial benefits along the way.

Social Networking in the Collaborative Enterprise

Why are so many companies struggling to implement social networking approaches?

In its 2010 Social Networking in the Enterprise survey, Information Week found that 89% of respondents are using collaborative technologies such as blogs, wikis, discussion forums, or social network systems. Yet only 10% of these same respondents consider their social networking initiatives to be a great success.

Collaborative technologies such as Unified Communications have certainly delivered recognized returns. However, the numbers in this study suggest social networking — another layer of collaborative technology — is not proving successful at this point.

Diving down into the data, the report's authors discovered some significant gaps that may be undermining adoption. "[Social networking technologies] aren't connected to e-mail and other apps, and it's too hard to bring information from the Web into these internal social networks," contends the report's author, Michael Healey. "Meantime, companies aren't even monitoring what people do on these platforms."

One problem may be an absence of interdepartmental commitment and consensus. The study found that only 8% of companies are approaching these initiatives with a coordinated team that spans disciplines. (In fact, most efforts seem to be spearheaded and led by marketing.)

But there also seems to be little advice or encouragement. "Companies are shockingly complacent in setting rules and issuing guidance on how employees should use social media—barely a quarter of our survey respondents' companies even have a policy on what to do when employees make inappropriate comments online," writes Healey, suggesting IT groups are in a strong position to step into this role.

There's clearly an incentive to take these initiatives more seriously. "Done right, enterprise social networking will introduce new work concepts and boost productivity," says Healey. "Done wrong, you'll squander an opportunity to help teams who want to collaborate more, and you'll end up burning money on yet another project that's ignored by users."

To be successful, IT groups are going to have to take a much more active role in these initiatives, contends Healey. They'll have to actively monitor usage, spot underused tools and lay out strategies to boost usage. They'll need to provide an architectural vision and integrate new social tools with existing collaborative tools such as email or smart phones. They'll also need clear policies for security and compliance. "The next few years present a new opportunity to rewire enterprise collaboration and communication processes," concludes Healey.

Collaboration Technology Supports the New Normal

Dynamic collaboration across enterprise and inter-enterprise boundaries represents "the new normal." Organizations are now challenged to work closely with suppliers, partners and contractors to deliver their offerings in today's high velocity markets.

"Web 2.0 tools such as video portals, podcasts, blogs, wikis, and discussion forums are changing the way in which information is created, published, managed, and consumed," according to a recent report from Cisco. "Technology advances and the need to work outside of normal business hours and locations foster an increasingly mobile and distributed workforce. A flood of new devices and applications is entering the corporate IT environment as employees elect to merge consumer-based tools with standardized communications."

As organizations grapple with global value chains, information overload, and more mobile workforces, they are challenged to embrace and integrate new collaboration capabilities.

"As the number of intra- and intercompany stakeholders increases, the number of collaborative tools and communication formats increases," states the report. "In other words, the scope of collaboration must be broadened. It must combine document- and text-centric collaboration -- such as email messaging, instant messaging (IM), team workspaces, and conferencing -- with voice, video, and context to fully support the needs of the business."

Cisco contends that enterprises will need to recognize several key principles as they implement collaboration technology and infrastructure in the coming years. Among them:

• An interoperable, open architecture: As collaboration increasingly occurs across organizations and with people on the move, it is no longer a given that IT can control the devices and applications used in collaborative sessions. Today’s environment requires an interoperable, open architecture that allows for any device or application to use a core set of collaborative services.


• Secure inter-company collaboration: Organizations will increasingly move from collaboration within functions to intra-company collaboration to inter-company collaboration. In this environment, securely enabling collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers as if they were behind the firewall is fundamental. For example, Cisco Show and Share enables the creation of secure video communities to share ideas and expertise.


• Flexible deployment models: IT requires the flexibility to adjust to a dynamically changing business and technology environment. Enterprise and IT architects do not make decisions in the context of on-premises versus on-demand, but seek to couple the robustness, security, and performance of the enterprise network with the openness and flexibility of collaboration through the cloud.

Strategic planners in IT need to ensure they construct a core foundation that supports a rapidly evolving set of applications — one that also optimizes the various media types that comprise today’s collaborative experience. They'll need an open architecture that secures collaboration and supports multiple approaches to deployment.

YouTube! for the Enterprise - But Better!

Many businesses have embraced rich media and created channels on YouTube! to share videos with prospects, customers and employees. However, exponential possibilities exist for secure video communities that enable members to easily create and share videos, collaborate with higher relevance and eliminate time spent searching for specific information housed within the videos, themselves.

Take education, for example. Schools are able to create distance learning programs that are accessible to a global student body. Self-paced learning means that time zones are not the logistical quagmire that existed when sessions were presented via live streaming presentations.  The ability to automatically create transcripts from the audio enables students to choose the format that works best for them, or to easily search for an exact reference within a video and find it instantly either by tag or search phrase.

Even better, collaboration and shared learning is encouraged by allowing students to enter comments that are reflected within the video flow at the appropriate place.

Imagine the differences in enterprise training programs or team collaboration that can take place with the ease of accessing the community from anywhere at any time and participating in a conversation that’s highly relevant based on a specific point in the training or materials presented.

Ease of Use Based on Intuitive Interface and Toolset

Because Cisco Show and Share works with most USB or built-in computer cameras and microphones, creating videos is simple and easy. You don’t need to worry about making a mistake as the system includes tools for editing and splitting clips as well as inserting slides in sync with your subject matter.

Video is Exploding

Research on YouTube! shows that people are watching 2 billion videos a day and uploading more than 24 hours of video every single minute of the day. Once you understand that it’s estimated that YouTube! only accounts for 26% of the world’s video audience, you can see the impact that video is having on how we work, play and learn. Implementing a secure video community to enable rich interaction through video and collaboration could just be the killer app for transforming your enterprise or learning programs.

Integrate Collaboration Tools with SIP for Improved Communication

Are you hip to SIP? Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Unified Communications (UC) are coming together to create powerful new capabilities. 

Irwin Lazar, vice president of communications and collaboration research at Nemertes Research, contends that SIP is becoming the essential protocol for Unified Communications. One driver of this is the use of SIP to enable interconnection with media-rich communications applications such as videoconferencing.

Nemertes Research's recent report, "SIP-O-Nomics: Saving Money and Simplifying Architecture with the Session Initiation Protocol," made the case that the protocol is an enabling force in the drive toward new levels of business productivity and performance.

The research firm states that UC deployments "are rapidly growing, with 60 percent of IT practitioners saying they are implementing Unified Communications. Those deploying are seeing tangible, quantifiable benefits such as increased sales, reduced travel, more efficient use of field support personnel, and greater contact center optimization, in addition to gains in productivity."

The paper further argues that SIP provides the "glue" now used to pull together disparate communications systems – such as email, conferencing, phone and Web chat -- into a single unified platform.

Source: Nemertes Research

"SIP session management addresses the challenge of operating a multi-vendor, multi-protocol telecommunications environment," according to the firm. "Twenty-two percent of organizations say they operate multi-vendor voice infrastructures. In fact, multi-vendor integration is a top concern for organizations seeking to implement Unified Communications."

As the research firm explains, SIP session management addresses these concerns by "enabling easy interconnectivity of SIP-based applications, often mediating between various proprietary implementations of SIP or SIP extensions."

It's a powerful trend that promises to more fully leverage the tools and technologies associated with Unified Communications. "SIP offers the potential to reduce telecom operational cost and complexity, take advantage of new hosted services, and integrate disparate applications via Unified Communications to improve collaboration," according to the firm. "The introduction of SIP session management offers the potential to simplify communications system and policy management by fundamentally rethinking the way organizations deploy and integrate disparate communications applications."

Collaboration in Action: Key Applications for Unified Communications

What are the major applications of Unified Communication that have emerged in today’s enterprises? That’s a question addressed here in this brief video featuring Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting.



Take a look at 5 major application areas for unified communications:

1. Incoming Contact Management. These applications address the needs of individuals within an organization who are directly interacting with customers, suppliers and other outside parties. They may be receiving calls or other forms of inbound communication. Key applications include presence, click to communicate, conferencing, automated call routing and the ability to incorporate content into an interaction.


2. Information for Mobile Personnel. These apps are focused on field personnel.  Information flows out to these individuals, they see it on their mobile devices, and they have an opportunity to respond – perhaps click to communicate. They might communicate via text or a phone call. The key is that they remain linked to the enterprise when they are mobile.


3. Collaboration for Acceleration. These apps are for the people in the middle of the business who are creating new products, policies and ideas. These individuals are focused on getting new ideas to market as rapidly as possible. They might be most active in collaborative workspaces and other social tools that enable shared creation.  They are intent on sharing and producing ideas – relying on communication technology that’s built into their workflows and processes.


4. Resource Identification for Problem Resolution. These apps are designed for individuals responsible for solving problems.  Instead of manually seeking out individuals and resources to help them solve problems, they now have the ability to click a button and run software-driven search. Such actions will help them determine who is available and who might be able to help them solve particular problems. Collaborative applications could include instant messaging, a voice conversation, web sharing application or a video conference.


5. Communication-Enabled Portals. These apps are generally directed to individuals who are running operations. They may be actively using particular business applications such as SAP or SalesForce.com. Unified Communication could give them the ability to collaborate from within their software applications. 

Unified Communication is now transforming enterprises on many levels. By being aware of these types of apps and their business implications, promoters of collaborative technology put themselves in a strong position to make the case for new investments.

Where’s the ROI on Collaboration?

Great question. These are challenging economic times. Every significant investment deserves careful analysis. So where’s the evidence that investments in collaboration technology will pay off?

One area to look for ROI is in operations. According to recent research from Salire Partners, there are several opportunities to reduce and/or avoid operational costs through smart collaboration.

First, the research firm points to significant savings to be realized through a migration from Private Branch Exchange (PBX) to IP Telephony – reducing infrastructure costs even as you lay the foundations for advanced capabilities that were previously beyond reach.

Second, the company points to video conferencing technologies such as Telepresence as a means of reducing travel costs. Finally, it notes that web conferencing technology can reduce costs associated with meetings and training, while also reducing office space demands.

These are hard dollar savings – going straight to the bottom line – and they are reasonably simple to calculate.

Over a time span of three years, Salire conducted analysis on hundreds of enterprises of different sizes and in different industries around the world.  These enterprises had implemented Unified Communications, IP telephony and collaboration solutions. Researchers explored the net benefit of technology investments, total expected costs to implement, and length of payback period.

Salire found that nearly 80% of companies had realized a positive return on investment from their collaboration technologies.  In some industries, the five-year ROI exceeded 100% with payback periods of 21 to 41 months. One more key finding: these results were being experienced by enterprises both large and small. Organizations with 1,000 to 5,000 employees experienced ROI of 173% with an average payback period of 27 months.



Salire also studied the types of savings. What it discovered is that many categories generated especially high returns. Enterprises drove down costs, for instance, by reducing moves, adds and changes to the voice network. Organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees reduced these costs by 85%. Enterprises also experienced significant savings on local, long distance and audio conferencing service charges.



With ROI benefits also emerging in terms of productivity and strategic reinvention of the business, the case for collaboration is becoming increasingly clear and compelling. Expect to see collaboration technology become a powerful lever in the coming years as enterprises concentrate on driving out costs while simultaneously driving up performance.