The Demand For Video Collaboration and Huddle Spaces – Part 3

This is part three of our sit down with Tely’s CEO Todd Abbott to examine how the UC&C landscape and subsequently its demand have increased significantly, especially as the industry moves towards providing the ability for more enriched and impromptu collaboration. You can click here to read part 1 and part 2.

In the final installment of our Q&A with Tely CEO Todd Abbott, we discuss the future outlook for video adoption in the enterprise.

Q: We see many new VCaaS providers popping up. Why?
A: Today about 80 vendors are serving the VCaas market for about 8M users worldwide. The majority of users are in North America. Wainhouse Research is predicting a 50% compound growth in the subscriber base and 70-80 million VCaas users in 5 years. This is largely driven by the expectations of a changing workforce, the need to reduce IT burden and the ability to seamlessly connect with partners, suppliers and customers. The economics of cloud-based video collaboration is a no brainer. It helps reduce CAPEX and streamline OPEX costs (pay as you go model) and reduces the risks of technology obsolescence and sunk costs.

Q. What are your thoughts on what’s to come for VCaas offerings?
A: These vendor solutions have delivered great functionality to desktop and mobile devices, but have been lacking at bringing this functionality into the conference room where group collaboration is required. Companies need to leverage the benefit of the physical world collaboration into the virtual world; desktop collaboration on its own loses this capability. By enabling virtual meeting rooms and small group collaboration, companies foster better, faster and more effective decision-making.

Q: Do you think the industry as a whole is ready and will adapt and evolve to this need?
Like a lot of industries, when legacy companies are slow to address the cost of usability of the technology they provide, that’s when disruptive companies come in and address those scalability and usability challenges. I believe that if the industry makes room based collaboration technology easy to use and easy to deploy at an affordable price, we will see the 5% video penetration rate to move to 20+%.

Q: What does this all mean for CIOs? How is the outlook for them?
A: The good news for CIOs is that the industry is finally ready to enable broader deployment of video collaboration into the huddle space, ushering in a new era of real-time collaboration for their employees, be it across the office or around the globe.