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The digital workplace encompasses many technologies that require enterprises to focus on a sound, holistic strategy, which should include synergy between the technologies required to support key business processes. When thinking about video collaboration, a successful strategic enterprise video plan must include support for mobility. Planners should evaluate enterprise video platform providers with strong mobile support, who cater to the needs of the digital workplace, which includes a dynamic and mobile workforce.
Follow the use cases
The use cases for mobile video are innumerable, and new ones will continue to be discovered across all industries. Enterprise planners have to look at areas where mobile video can be leveraged to improve efficiencies in business processes—whether that be training, real-time collaborative interactions, or corporate communications. It is clear that mobile video should be a critical part of your current enterprise video strategy. Enterprise planners have to make sure it’s integrated with existing video infrastructure investments as well.
Pay attention to video content management
A critical step is to ensure effective management of the video content life cycle itself. Also, ensure that providers can handle video content management within their own portfolio or are integrated with a partner specializing in video content management. The artifacts of video communications and collaboration have to be recognized and cast as content. That content then needs to be managed and governed like any other content type in the enterprise.
It’s about video-enabling business processes and how people work
Video conferencing has become a critical enterprise tool. It has proven itself to be effective for cutting travel costs, reducing time, and increasing productivity when applied correctly to business processes and how people work.
Planners have to continually look at video and leverage it for specific business applications. This includes addressing the changing dynamics of the workplace and modern workforce, which has become increasingly mobile. In the next several years, by 2020, mobile workers will account for over 60% of the US workforce.
Enterprises have to also deal with an extended workforce that is geographically dispersed and includes external partners, contractors, and suppliers. This requires a dedicated overall mobile workplace strategy. People management strategies will also need to be adjusted and updated to reflect this new dynamic workplace.
Enterprise planners have to incorporate mobile video and, specifically, mobile video conferencing, across the workplace with the goal of enhancing the many interactions that occur within each business process. Real-time interactivity is a crucial part of collaboration that is required for any modern organization to succeed.
Why mobile video?
Mobile video benefits enterprises across many business disciplines, from training to collaborative interactions. Because they use video on personal devices, such as smartphones and tablets, consumers have become way savvier with video. There is a plethora of mobile apps that incorporate video and make creating and editing video content fairly straightforward on mobile devices. This is impacting the enterprise's and vertical industries’ adoption of video.
Consumer platforms that publish video, such as Instagram, Vimeo, and YouTube, have exponentially increased the amount of video content being delivered and consumed daily. Businesses that leverage these platforms to interact with consumers via video find them very effective for many uses, including marketing, sales support, customer service, and stakeholder communications.
Final recommendations
We’re seeing that enterprise video conferencing and collaboration providers increasingly support mobile video for various uses. When evaluating providers, ensure that they have support and specific solutions for your industry and business use cases. Video content management (VCM) is also critical, so be sure prospective providers can deliver VCM capability, either natively or through an integrated solution with a partner. Polycom, for example, has a dedicated video content management solution within its portfolio. This can bode especially well for customers who have already invested in Polycom video solutions and infrastructure.
Pay attention to the following, which is a representative list of enterprise video providers that planners can use to create a shortlist of providers to evaluate for mobile video use cases.
Representative enterprise video conferencing and collaboration providers
Representative enterprise video content management and delivery providers
David Mario Smith is Founder and Principal Analyst at InFlow Analysis. Mr. Smith is a Gartner veteran of over 16 years and an IT industry professional with 20 years of experience in the collaboration and workplace technology markets. For more information, visit http://inflowanalysis.com or follow him on Twitter @DaveMario.
