Making the Case: Ten Reasons You Need to Add Video to Your Practice. Now.

Video conferences are no more disruptive than a phone call, but can be tremendously more productive. Find out the top 10 reasons you need to add video to your existing portfolio (and even to your own organization’s communication strategy) below. And, for more information about the award-winning, best-of-breed Avaya Radvision video collaboration suite, differentiators and benefits, please visit our microsite or contact your Catalyst sales representative.

1. Exponential Video Growth. NPD Group forecasts that the total number of video call users will surpass 380 million by 2015. Likewise, Frost & Sullivanreports 51% of organizations use video conferencing today and a whopping 89% of NA companies plan to use video more extensively in the next 12 months. The video market is growing and so are the opportunities for our partners, both in uncovering new prospects and increasing wallet-share with their existing base.
2. Increasing Efficiency and Speeding the Decision-Making Process.Consider this from Forrester Research: “[video] helps to put a face and mannerisms to a name and voice, enabling remote and distributed teams to feel more connected and more committed to shared goals”. When people are able to connect and collaborate more easily than ever before, it not only increases collaboration but improves workforce productivity and satisfaction as well. And as users reported in the Wainhouse Research report, the top benefit of video conferencing is increased efficiency/productivity (94%), shortly followed by expedited decision making (87%).
3. Video Quality. Full HD video quality has never been more accessible, or more affordable, as it is today, on a consumer AND a business level. Having a higher resolution has made the experience far more lifelike than ever before and the leading providers are doing it at a fraction of the cost of historically clunky and pricey systems, opening high-quality video up to organizations who previously viewed it as out of reach from a financial perspective.
4. Mobile & Desktop Capabilities. According to CIO Magazine, 52% of surveyed companies plan to encourage or require employees to BYOD in the next 12 to 18 months and Time reports that 45% of the U.S. workforce now has a job that’s suitable for full-time or part-time telecommuting. Being able to access video from on the go or from your home office is becoming more of a requirement, instead of a nice-to-have, a key factor in why Gartner projects a 400% increase in dedicated video soft clients by 2016, and the mobile and desktop video market continues to grow at double-digit rates Y/Y.
5. Ease of Use. One of the biggest inhibitors of adoption for video is ease of use. The days of IT having to meticulously set up each video call in the conference room are over. Today, connecting to a video call can be as simple as a touch or a swipe and a request to join can be sent easily via eCalendar invite or email, from a mobile device, a desktop, or from the conference room. Having a video system that’s easy to use will enable users to feel more confident in the video platform, and early adopters will help facilitate the expansion of video usage throughout the organization.
6. Affordability. The bottom line is important to all businesses. By replacing travel with video, or adding video to speed decision making between teams, companies save money, free up resources, and even do their part in ‘going green’. And, with the reduction in system costs and availability of cheaper, high-grade bandwidth, the overall ‘cost per user’ continues to decrease, making a video solution more attractive to smaller and mid-market customers. It’s a bottom line win-win!
7. Integration Capabilities. The main focus in today’s market is in providing a flexible, unified solution that merges voice, video, and data and makes it accessible from any location, from any place, and from any device. In today’s integrated landscape, participants can share screens, fully collaborate, chat, and even check presence all in an integrated audio and video session. Functionality in the video collaboration space will continue to rise as will the demand for truly unified solutions from the customer level.
8. Cost Reduction. Perhaps one of the most quantifiable benefits of video is the effects video collaboration has in reducing travel costs. With HD video, you can still get that ‘in-person’ experience with a prospect, partner, or customer without having to travel, saving both time and money and freeing up your internal resources. And, other technological advances in video (compression, scalable video coding, bandwidth management, etc.) make the solution itself much more affordable overall and on a per-user basis on the backend, as well.
9. Security.  One concern for organizations when it comes to video is the security of the call, specifically the transmission of voice, video, and data during videoconference meetings. When the systems are configured properly, the threat of attack or hack (whether from the mobile system or from the mobile device) is significantly decreased. Best-of-breed systems provide the proper settings and solutions to ensure secure meetings going forward and address the security concerns for the IT group and the organization as a whole.
10.  ‘Vertical’ Possibilities Are Endless. Schools can use video to conduct distance learning sessions or other collaborative sessions with students and/or peers. First responders can view a video of the emergency on their smartphone, quickening their evaluation time upon arriving on the scene. Doctors can collaborate with specialists and even remotely care for patients. No matter what vertical, video collaboration truly opens the doors for selling smarter and deeper into your customer base and giving you the fuel to expand into verticals you might not be in currently.