In the blink of an eye the way society communicates has changed forever. Our children right through to our parents are all comfortable using the internet and mobile-based video communication. Why wouldn’t they? Being virtually face-to-face is thrilling and deeply satisfying. With many social networks, internet chat and search engines all vying to deliver video communication to the masses, it’s becoming inescapable. This extensive use of video in our personal lives suggests that employees are ready to embrace video in the workplace. So why is the enterprise that sees visual communication as a natural way to improve employee productivity having such a hard time implementing it?
The challenges of video deployment
The problem with today’s video systems can be summed up in one short sentence: ‘They are just too difficult to use’. How many times have we heard that we need to allow 15 minutes to get the video call up? The reality is that most of us will need the intervention of an expert who can successfully fiddle around with the remote control and initiate the meeting on our behalf. Or worse, we boycott video conferencing altogether and go back to less satisfying and woefully unproductive audio conferencing and travel. All of this adds up to low utilisation of video conferencing across an organisation. Alongside ease-of-use and low utilisation are a number of other unresolved issues such as difficulties in connecting to people, ability to easily make ad hoc calls, quality of experience and reliability, limited interoperability, and then, of course, the big issue of no integration with voice and other collaboration tools. All of these problems come crashing down to a single point of impact – the user. When the experience is inconsistent and the system mind-bogglingly hard to use, when multiple dial plans are in operation, the cost-of-ownership is high and the system needs centralised management, it’s no wonder usage is low. To overcome these problems, the video conferencing and telepresence industry needs to take a few sharp lessons from the world of voice. A century in the making, few would dispute that the phone is the easiest communication device on the planet today. If we apply the simplicity of enterprise telephony to the world of video, how can it solve the challenges of broad video deployment, while at the same time gain user acceptance, to deliver on the promise of lower costs and increased productivity?
The impossibilities of pleasing everyone
Face it, there will always be those amongst us with a ‘not in my lifetime’ attitude to video on the desktop and in meeting rooms. That said, there are only two key considerations that will pave the way to create user acceptance. Foremost is education, and the need for employees to embrace what video can do for them. Specifically, how it improves their work-life balance, team communication, job satisfaction and personal performance, as well as ease of use and desirability. Individuals need something that is more Apple iPhone than remote control – something they don’t have to think about. What is needed is a consistent interface that works the same way for voice and video, whether it’s in a meeting room or on a desk. So we come back to the phone, but adapting the desk phone is not the answer.
The road to unified voice and video is littered with the failure of the videophone. Good in principle, but its tiny screen and built-in camera completely miss the point and instead of a quality experience, users gain limited video functionality. A whole service business has evolved to address user difficulties. Booking systems, scheduling portals, remote help desks, attendants, concierge services – all exist to overcome the complexities of the video endpoint and its supporting architecture.
It’s like stepping back in time to the days when all international calls had to be pre-booked, and required the assistance of a telephone operator to physically connect you.
By drawing our parallels with the world of telephony, it is clear that this service provision cannot cost-effectively scale to meet the need for pervasive video. Furthermore, as the enterprise scales its video into more rooms and into the hands of its workforce, the network architecture will grow alongside and mutate to become both a management and cost burden. For this reason a new architectural approach is critical.
A new generation for voice and video
As manufacturers struggle to provide unified voice and video, they often forget about the other tools and functionality we need. StarLeaf is the only one that has solved the voice and video collaboration conundrum by pairing a new generation of smartphone with a large desktop telepresence screen, which also works with your laptop. The StarLeaf Phone does everything you would expect a phone with a dial tone to do, but it does it for video too. Taking the very best from the mobile world, including instant access to corporate directories and personal contacts, it features a touch-screen panel that visually guides you through a wealth of telephony and video functionality, such as conferencing and transferring calls.
A single device that requires no training, the StarLeaf Phone is positioned to revolutionise both voice and video communication while delivering an exceptional quality user experience. StarLeaf has reimagined enterprise communications and developed a new centerpiece for all voice and video calls. It’s a telepresence PBX and it works much like the telephony PBX, with one exception: it is paired with the StarLeaf Phone and together they completely transform the user and administrator experience.
The key here is that the enterprise is offered one platform and one consistent management interface that will help scale video and bring it into mainstream communications. The telepresence PBX represents a single point for all voice and video management and works alongside any existing telephony and video systems to ensure full interoperability. Simply put, by allowing you to use your telephone number for video, the whole world becomes accessible.
While millions of people use internet-based video every hour of every day, business video has yet to hit ‘prime time’. When it does it will bring about a step-change, not only in the way people communicate, but also in how businesses operate in a global society. Putting the right tools in the hands of knowledge workers, allowing them the immediacy of video, will remove errors from processes, speed up development cycles, help bring products to market faster and, of course, reduce travel costs. In the end, removing the complexities and frustrations inherent in current video and telepresence systems can only be achieved by replacing them with the simplicity of the telephony world.