Video conferencing: 2 years later, same results

I follow the video conferencing industry closely, so when I saw the headline "Why Video Conferencing Sucks" in my news reader, I had to click over. What I found was an opinion piece by TechNewsWorld columnist Rob Enderle.

He wrote about how video conferencing is still failing to meet business users' expectations in this heavily saturated market -- not only from a technology and cost perspective, but also a human perspective.

"The big problem that no one seems to want to address is that we generally don't like conversing for long looking someone else in the eye," Rob writes. This, he says, is a major reason "why people generally need to be forced to use these systems."

Remote working: Employees' needs not being met

Telecommuting and virtual offices are becoming more pervasive across enterprises, but it's presenting a trade-off. "... while workers want autonomy and flexibility, they also want social connection," writes Jessica Stillman in a recent GigaOM article.

We're seeing this among enterprises too. One of the common challenges executives are grappling with is how to overcome the sense of isolation employees can get when working remotely.

The case for and against video conferencing

You gotta love Google Alerts. In my e-mail the other week was a juicy little tidbit that caught my eyes.

John Bartlett, a blogger for Unified Communications Strategies, recently hosted a podcast with his fellow bloggers to discuss use cases for video conferencing in business. They examined where video adds value, as well as where it does not in several spaces, including health care, human resources, mobile, and virtual conferencing.

I found it interesting, and I think you will too, because if you're reading this blog, you probably follow the UC space. Several insightful examples where brought to light by the panelists, which included Pam Avila, Art Rosenberg, Blair Pleasant, Don Van Doren, Michael Finneran, and Dave Michels.

Microsoft snatches human-powered network from Cisco in Skype acquisition

Microsoft's acquisition of Skype comes at a noteworthy time. Last week, amid the breaking news and coverage about the deal, another major technology story took a new turn. It was headlined by Cisco.

The company announced that it plans to continue its massive restructuring, shut down underperforming business units, and cut $1 billion in expenses by fiscal 2012. That also might include laying off up to 4,000 employees, potentially the biggest layoff in the company's history.

This comes on the heels of Cisco folding its Flip video camera business in April as part of its restructuring of its consumer unit. It's a change that holds new significance now that Microsoft has acquired Skype.

In my opinion, the Microsoft-Skype deal has moved the center of the human-powered network to Redmond. Microsoft has taken Cisco's position in the market in one fell $8.5 billion swoop.

Think about it. Microsoft has historically been the data and document titan. Skype adds voice and video to its offerings, and Lync will be the connector that brings it the enterprise. Taken together, Microsoft has created the human-powered network that Cisco never was.

96 percent of organizations use virtual meetings

If there was ever a doubt that virtual meetings are here in full force, this new finding should dispel it. Some 96 percent of meeting and event planners report that their organizations use virtual meeting technologies -- either Web-based meetings, videoconferencing, or telepresence -- according to a Carlson Wagonlit Travel study.

This probably isn't surprising at first blush. But based on what we're seeing in the marketplace, I think it is. The report cites several factors driving the use of virtual meetings, including improved technology, increased cost pressures, interest in limiting their meetings' environmental impact, and interest in improving employees' productivity and work-life balance.

If these are the business objectives that companies want to achieve, they're turning to the wrong technology. In our customer interactions and discussions, we often hear complaints about the lack of engagement and boredom they experience with Web conferencing services.

What they're looking for is a virtual workplace that lets them increase engagement, collaboration, and productivity, while driving down travel costs and carbon emissions. Sure you can meet almost anytime, anywhere right now using 2-D, "flatland" conferencing services. But we can enable a highly productive, collaborative remote workforce with 3-D virtual workplaces.

What's the case for your organization? How are you using virtual meetings, and how do you think virtual meetings will evolve over the next few years? Feel free to share your stories in the comments.

And for more about the study findings, hit Sue Hatch's coverage in Corporate Meetings and Incentives. I also left my two cents on the findings in the comments. :)

Tandberg's desktop video conferencing tool: Once telepresence, always telepresence

CAMERA READY? Many enterprise users say no

I don't really have an axe to grind with Tandberg. But it just seems every time I see news about Tandberg and the way it sells video, my alarm bells go off.

So with apologies and all due respect to the good folks at Tandberg, I really need to respond to their recent announcement.

The company released desktop telepresence solution, EX90 the other week. I have two main thoughts on it.

First off, it might be a step in the right direction as far as enterprise collaboration goes. Any tool that reduces costs and increases efficiency can be advantageous for enterprise users.

But it still doesn't solve the broad distribution and enterprise penetration issue surrounding telepresence. At the risk of being repetitive, there are a lot of reasons I don't see all employees in an organization using video every time they want to collaborate. Rather than rehash all my viewpoints, I'll refer you back to some of my previous posts on telepresence.

This also brings to mind an article written by Kishore S. Swaminathan, Chief Scientist at Accenture. He penned a piece for the company's Outlook journal last month, saying, "Now, a new medium, the videoconference, is rapidly emerging as an important way for executives to communicate with their employees, upper management and customers. By understanding the medium and mastering its dynamics, you can significantly improve your effectiveness as an executive."

How ProtoSphere stacks up according to In a Strange Land

If you've heard me talk about ProtoSphere at any length, you've probably heard me say that one benefit to presenting and sharing information in the application is that it can help avoid "death by PowerPoint." This is because the environment lets users interact around content and with one another, instead of listening to the person with the token present whatever he or she thinks is important.

Iggy O, a blogger for In a Strange Land, thought so too. He wrote about ProtoSphere last week, dubbed "No Flying, But No More Death By PowerPoint: The ProtoSphere Virtual World." He talks about our Media Carousel, and how the immersive environment compares to video conferencing. Get the full read by swinging over to In a Strange Land.

SIZING UP: In a Strange Land writes about ProtoSphere

Cisco's pipe dream: mainstream enterprise adoption of telepresence

I've written before about why Cisco's push to bring video to the desktop won't achieve critical mass in the enterprise. While telepresence might be justified as an investment for large conference rooms in global enterprises, it fails to address major cost and complexity problems and human factors issues that have historically prevented large-scale video deployments from achieving mainstream adoption.

Joel Stein reminded me of this in a recent Time Magazine article he wrote. He covered problems surrounding Skype and video presence, saying, " ... Skype breaks the century-old social contract of the phone: We pay close attention while we're talking and zone out while you are."

That's just one of several funny, yet compelling comments Stein makes in a great op-ed column that, I think, is a must read for anyone interested in the human factors that drive communication and collaboration.

You can easily say the same of Cisco's WebEx, Microsoft's Live Meeting, and other screen- and app-share tools. How many times have you been on a WebEx or similar conference and put the phone on mute, checked e-mail, surfed the Web, took a mobile phone call, or walked away from your desk?

The fact of the matter is, we don't want to do video all the time. Cisco's pursuing a pipe dream, just like AT&T before them. The first video phones were shown at the 1964 New York World's Fair. They're still not mainstream. And they never will be.

The line between video conferencing's success and failure

As we talk about human factors here on the blog, I was reminded of a white paper I read that covered the findings of a study on video conferencing. In the study, University of North Carolina researchers identified recommendations for planning and implementing video conferencing to support interaction and collaboration among large groups.

You can click over to the white paper to read more about their suggestions, which I thought were insightful. But I was particularly interested by some of the background studies that the white paper referenced. These studies identified two challenges when groups try to collaborate using video conferencing, both of which arise from human factors:

One, video conferencing is not the best environment for brainstorming. And two, video conferencing is not the best environment for conflict resolution. Video conferencing tends to be an environment where just one person is comfortable talking at a time. It can be difficult, as the studies find, to share information, bounce ideas off one another, negotiate and bargain, ask questions, resolve disagreements, and make decisions.

All of this can obviously hinder collaboration, which takes me back to an argument I've made before on the blog: If you blend live or prerecorded video with other collaboration tools unified by a 3-D infrastructure, video becomes more useful, less complicated, and far less costly. Video conferencing might be justified as an investment for large conference rooms in global businesses, but it fails to address the human and cost factors that have, to date, prevented large-scale video deployments from achieving critical mass in the enterprise.

Telepresence and live video: From intrusion to invaluable

In my last post reacting to the Cisco-Tandberg deal, I promised to explain why Cisco's push to bring video to the desktop won't break out of the enterprise's largest conference rooms.

Here are several reasons why, all of which arise from the human factors of virtual collaboration.

Modern teleworkers don't always dress for success. I'm writing this post, taking calls, and "collaborating virtually" at a time of day when my mind is sharp, but my appearance might not be. Maybe I worked until the wee hours of the morning, caught some sleep, and am now back at it. I might look tired. I might need a shave. I might not be wearing a tie. I might be grabbing breakfast at my desk.

I certainly don't want to be on a video conference right now. Of course, if I knew there was a board meeting, I'd be prepared, and telepresence or other live video would be fine with me. But collaboration mostly happens without an appointment, without a formal meeting, often without advance preparation, at all hours of the day and night.

The last thing most workers want is to have the red light go on when they least expect it, or when they don't believe they are as presentable, appearance wise, as they want to or should be. Human factors 1, telepresence 0.

Cisco's Tandberg deal: Big ambitions, big challenges for telepresence

So last week Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) announced a definitive agreement to acquire all outstanding shares of Tandberg (OSLO: TAA.OL) for $3.0 billion in cash (that would be 153.5 Norwegian Kroner per share).

Company officials positioned Cisco's motivation for the deal as helping Cisco "expand its collaboration portfolio" so the company could "offer more solutions to a greater number of customers," and accelerate market adoption.

Let me scrub the public relations spin off of that, translate into plain English, and reveal Cisco's real motivation for this pretty sizable acquisition. Cisco has a problem. Their big push to bring video conferencing to the enterprise hasn't been able to break out of the largest conference rooms within an organization.