Business
video needs to take a leaf out of the consumer video book – focus on the user
experience.
What is
missing in the business video arena is a great user experience. I coined the
phrase a few years ago ‘making video as easy as making a mobile phone call’.
This is one of the biggest reasons video has not been adopted as quickly by
businesses as vendors have hoped. Traditionally, business-quality video has
been disjointed, restricting and clunky.
Consumer
video products, such as Skype and Facetime give the user a fluid, easy-to-use,
and beautiful looking experience. Their interfaces are simple, social and
familiar. Business video needs to take a leaf out of their book as far as
aesthetics, ease-of-use and user experience are concerned. However, what they
can’t do is connect with other products and provide business-quality, high
definition and secure video calls and Virtual Meeting Rooms (VMRs).
Almost
everyone these days is using consumer-video, but not so much in the workplace,
why? Why if they use it personally are they not using it, or being expected to
use it professionally. I think it stands to reason that they are not being
offered the same user experience (regardless of the technology providers behind
it).
Imagine
the possibilities if you could marry consumer-video aesthetics and familiarity,
with interoperable business-video at an affordable cost with outstanding
customer service. Users resonate with products they can hold a familiarity with
and a service they can trust. This will truly be the Holy Grail for any video
managed service provider.
With the
world moving to cloud for many business tools and services, video being a main
one, user experience and ease of use is one of the keys to help drive success,
and more importantly drive usage and adoption, which will turn drive greater
service revenues for providers. A single user interface is the answer; one that
does not restrict the user to being within their own network or building. It
should also be a tool to help users manage their video calls, their VRMs and
also provide the tools such as meeting scheduling and usage reports. It should also
capture other useful information like call history so users can add any new
addresses to their address book for use as required. It should pay for itself
in abundance and it should reward users for their usage.
Businesses are realising they should leave the
service to experts, and actually do not want to fork out hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of dollars on infrastructure and expertise to stay on the
cutting edge of technology or even maintain a legacy environment. We (business and users) do not do this for
mobile phones, so why should we do this for video? Companies (CIO and CTO’s)
are starting to look at this and realise a service provider may just be the
answer. Why not just take a video
endpoint on a service and let the service provider keep adding value? This makes sense doesn't it? That’s what a service provider should do, add
value and develop new products and services to ensure customers get what they
need to ensure they have the best service and user experience possible. At an
affordable price of course, that does not mean super cheap, as I firmly believe
you get what you pay for.
Most of the video managed service providers in
the market all have their USPs, for some it’s quality, capacity, security and
support. While others offer you
unlimited VMRs for every employee in your business, which is a great sales
pitch, but in reality will never be used to the full extent, not even close, the
majority of video calls will be made one-to-one, so it that adding value? No is
the answer. However, they do need access to a VMR when required and a hardware
or software endpoint, which is important.
Business video needs a single interface, which
should be accessible anywhere in the world, on any web-enabled device. This
application needs to have a very wide cone of acceptance of products and
services to ensure it captures every possible user case, so no matter what
device you’re on or what service you’re using, you can connect to anyone and
everyone.
Large vendors are only really looking at the enterprise
market, whether that be large or small enterprise, its still only enterprise. There
are a growing number of other managed video providers coming to the market, and
some already in it, they all have their own user interface that adds value, but
do they add value beyond using them for just the service they provide? Cisco
has started to head down this path with Proximity, this is an enterprise tool
and only works within a business’s own network, it’s not an application that
you can use anywhere for making video calls and managing video meetings or
VMR’s as they are known.
To be truly user centric and add user value,
the application needs to be available to the user no matter which form of video
meeting they need to attend, or host. It needs to be flexible and almost needs
to become their mobile video work space, they should not need anything else
apart from, as I mentioned earlier a hardware or software endpoint to make and
receive calls. This will help drive usage and adoption. That said, you also
need a great quality and reliable service provider to provide high quality
video on a reliable network.
The Holy Grail is out there, who will bring it
to market? That is the question.
