Business video needs to take a leaf out of the consumer video book.

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.