The stars are aligning for video conferencing to become a mainstream technology, creating opportunities for channel partners to generate additional revenues with managed service offerings. Video quality is improving while bandwidth needs and costs are decreasing. Its ease of use and application across a variety of operating systems and platforms is boosting usage — and perceived value — on personal devices, desktops and in conference rooms of all sizes. The technology’s ability to reduce travel costs is often cited as an advantage, but perhaps the most important driver for video conferencing growth is the increasing perception that video is a way for businesses to compete more effectively via collaboration. The numbers bear this out:
- According to IDC, the video segment is “one of the fastest growing large networking markets with more than 20 percent year-over-year growth in three of the last four quarters."
- Infonetics Research predicts that enterprise video conferencing and telepresence system sales will hit $5 billion by 2015.
- The managed video and hosted services portion of that revenue is expected to reach $1.2 billion by 2016, says ABI Research.
As video conferencing becomes more popular, organizations are seeking a one-stop shop to manage the complexity of their video communications needs, including the purchase of equipment, installation and overall management. Getting a piece of this pie will require video management capabilities that enable channel partners to deliver high-quality performance across mixed vendor environments, with a comprehensive view into the entire video infrastructure and all related metrics, including those from third-party systems. Here are five reasons why video management is a key consideration when implementing a successful video managed service offering.
1. Too complex for many enterprises. Most companies can handle a couple of video endpoints in conference rooms, but IT departments quickly can become overwhelmed as deployments grow and a complex infrastructure is required. This, coupled with video’s high bandwidth demand and the complex quality of service (QoS) policies that must be applied, can quickly strain IT staff. In addition, IT must worry about remote workers and business-to-business communications, which both have firewall and network address translation traversal issues. And companies that decide to commit to a large video conferencing rollout often do so without a comprehensive video management strategy. All of this makes a service provider with the knowledge to manage complex video deployments a desirable alternative to in-house management.
