Are businesses ready to use video calling to their clients?

After 10 years of integrating VC into everyday workflows one thing we have learned is that people, especially providers of services or meeting chairmen, won’t learn videoconferencing and they don't want to do anything differently or pay for anything. VC has to be a sustainable extension of their every day workflows and it has to work without them doing anything differently. VC needs to be just another travel option offered to people in the same breath as allowing them to attend physically and it all needs to be web based so the environment is familiar. Video conferencing technology alone can’t achieve all that.

if you’re interested, this experience manifests in version 3 of our management platform that sits on top of video conference technologies and makes it easy for them to be used in an everyday sense. It uses an enterprise social networking environment like LinkedIn to establish peer to peer relationships and groups etc. as well as an events / meetings management platform where VC is just another viable travel option.

The other game changing development is SVC (scalable video coding) based video conference technologies. Essentially this breakthrough allows commercial grade HD multipoint video over unreliable networks like the internet using a standard computer and web cam. There are some major functional and quality breakthroughs but the three main factors for us are a) this can all happen in your workspace as easily as the telephone b) access - you no longer need a room, expensive equipment, expertise or dedicated networks and it works on the road and c) because its web service enabled we can make it really easy i.e. a single click. to get where you need to be.

All this combines to radically increase utilisation of video communications in the workplace at home or on the move with all the productivity, communication and savings that implies. One of our shareholder is a medical college in Australia that use a lot of video conferencing for medical education but in the past not much for corporate work. Since the new platform was released in January about 80 of their 130 staff in 8 locations now have web cams and behave as if they are one virtual office. As well there has been a significant increase in access to doctors who now participate in meetings because they don’t have to leave their rooms.

If you interested in more on this topic I recently played a small part in a series of interviews on this topic that you can listen to here - it’s about 30minutes....

http://www.zdnet.com.au/blogs/twisted-wire/soa/When-will-teleworking-take-off...