The Many Advantages of Video Conferencing and How VARs Can Capitalize

Video conferencing is one of the fastest growing segments of unified communication and collaboration. Video conferencing comes in a variety of forms: telepresence or meeting-room video conferencing, desktop conferencing and mobile video are the primary configurations. Any division of any business where meetings take place – finance, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, human resources, product development, sales or training – provides an appropriate situation to use video conferencing to:

• Connect remote staff without travel
• View data and presentations
• Bring in dispersed experts for dialogue and discussion
• Interview job candidates
• Receive important information at any time or place
• Hold hearings or union meetings
• Make a presentation to a vendor, partner or customer
• Train employees or clients
• Meet new people face-to-face

The use of video conferencing can improve productivity and competitive effectiveness by reducing unproductive travel time, limiting meeting delays, allowing for shorter and more disciplined meetings and creating a greater velocity of messages to more participants. It can be difficult to disseminate information to everyone at the same time, but with video conferencing, all individuals who need information can get it easily. Some of the competitive advantages that organizations can realize include:

• Product development and introduction to market can be accomplished much faster.

• Expedient problem resolution can involve all decision makers without the need for travel or an in-person meeting to be organized.

• Companies can meet and exceed their “green initiative” by reducing fuel consumption and pollution by limiting travel.

• With more productive meetings, better decisions can be made more quickly and effective collaboration at a distance is possible.

• As the of adoption video conferencing expands, enterprises are progressively looking at ways to integrate it into their unified communications architectures and extend it to remote and mobile users with desktop and mobile devices. Businesses are also keen to implement video conferencing across company boundaries and have the need to professionally manage video delivery and quality.

With all these advantages to the customer, how can VARs capitalize on this growing trend?

• Talk to customers about unified communications and video conferencing in particular. See if any of the benefits previously discussed are of interest. Gather information about cost justification like the average cost of a business trip, the cost of slow decision-making and the cost of training remote employees. Find out about “green initiatives” and tax breaks that can be obtained by being green.

• Determine existing data center components and network needs. Many data center requirements for video will often be a general need anyway.

• Average costs and compare to the cost of video conferencing. Use the cost offset to sell equipment, managed services, professional services and maintenance over time.

• Sell room-based conferencing and connect it into desktop and mobile conferencing. This way, any employee can get information need whenever they need it and VARs have a continuing stream of work and revenue.

VARs should capitalize on the upward trend of videoconferencing. In 2015, enterprise telepresence and video conferencing equipment sales will reach $5.4 billion. Understand how to talk to customers about it, be able to cost justify it and know how to grow it, and success will flourish in return.

Are we missing any collaboration tools you’d like to see discussed? Please feel free to add your comments here: