75% Of Enterprises To Use Videoconferencing By 2013

Source: InformationWeek

By Larry Barrett
April 25, 2011 05:34 PM

Immersive telepresence technology that uses high-definition, life-sized images holds great appeal for collaboration, but is costly and a bandwidth hog.

Despite all the purported benefits of video conferencing--reduced travel expenditures, increased collaboration among employees and immediacy--only about half of all enterprises have actually installed the technology and only about another 25% plan to in the next two years.

The biggest hang-up, according to a report from IT products and services firm CDW, turns out most often to be poor salesmanship on the part of the IT departments' video conferencing evangelists. Too often, they try to sway business leaders to foot the bill for the initial outlay for this Star Trek-like collaboration technology without providing either hard and fast return-on-investment figures or at least some well-defined, clearly articulated and measureable soft ROI benefits for their pet projects.

The net result, according to CDW's "Video Conferencing Straw Poll," is that only the largest enterprise customers have implemented video conferencing equipment and applications and most of them are content with the basic peer-to-peer (70%) and multisite meeting room variety (59%).

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