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July 11, 2013

Integration of video conferencing in workflow essential to boost productivity

Video conferencing highly supports collaborative work compared to simple audio conferencing.

By CBR Staff Writer

Integration of video conferencing (VC) in unified communications (UC) offers flexibility, while boosting productivity gains, a new report from Frost & Sullivan has suggested.

The report added that VC has also assisted in cutting costs, with mounting demand for several endpoints and hosting services.

Frost & Sullivan ICT research analyst, Mark Hickey, said while the primary reasons for deploying video conferencing are eliminating travel expenses and facilitating meetings with remote participants, its full benefits will be apparent only when it is embedded in everyday work practices.

"The regular use of video conferencing facilitates productivity gains through enhanced user participation, the inclusion of visual components like document and multimedia sharing and enabling specialist use cases like medical examinations," Hickey said.

According to the research firm, video conferencing highly supports collaborative work compared to simple audio conferencing, while also allows users to store documents in cloud and prevent exchanging several versions of the same document.

Conferencing is expected gain importance due to the rise in remote workers and the amount of business being performed on mobile devices and would assist in increase tasks to be executed out of the office.

"Despite its many advantages, users have valid concerns about video conferencing security and interoperability, especially as the bring your own device (BYOD) trend adds to the number of devices that systems must sync with," Hickey said.

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"To assuage these fears, system vendors are creating interoperable solutions and software vendors are offering UC platforms that connect different systems, such as Microsoft Lync 2013.

"Many solutions also work with free services such as Skype, offering breadth of scope to companies looking to connect with those that do not have enterprise-ready solutions."

Frost & Sullivan also reports that remote locations still remain underserved as investment in high-grade bandwidth would be a limit for the video conferencing market as video quality gets effected by infrastructure and network design.

"For now, cloud computing offers flexibility and increased productivity gains by combining video with file sharing as part of a UC solution," Hickey added.

"Although it will be a while before video becomes as easy to use as a phone, the lower costs and increased functionality of video as part of UC solutions will boost adoption rates in 2013."

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