The benefits of Unified Communications

Video is a technology revolution, and is changing the way people interact and communicate. It is becoming a supplement by further enhancing other technologies like audio, email, social media and instant messaging.

There have been video applications in use by consumers for many years, and often they are freeware applications. These can be limited in terms of their security, quality and reliability as they are web-based. In addition, these types of applications do not have a lot of the features that are required by businesses.

Sukhvinder Guraya is regional sales director, GCC (excluding Saudi Arabia & Iraq), Polycom

One of the biggest benefits that video collaboration can bring to a company is cutting down on business costs i.e. by cutting down the requirement to travel. But there is also the soft-matrix that helps increase productivity and employee satisfaction through a more flexible working environment and access to the right experts at the right time, allowing decisions to be made quickly.

A good example is the finance sector. One of the uses of video in banking, outside the meeting room, is the utilisation of video kiosks that enable customers to interact with bank employees and discuss their business in real time in person.

Rich, interactive visual solutions are also available that improve all facets of education—from student administration to course development to curriculum delivery to content management. Two immediate examples in the Gulf include the American University of Kuwait, which provides its faculty and students with audio and video conferencing tools necessary to facilitate learning with universities abroad, enabling them to hold classes in more than one classroom simultaneously and have speakers, guest lecturers and authors speak to classes from anywhere in the world.

In Washington, DC, Georgetown University uses state-of-the art telepresence technology to extend its educational reach and create a ‘global classroom’ with its branch campus, the School of Foreign Service in Qatar (SFS-Qatar) accommodating up to 18 students in tiered seating in Qatar and 10 students in Washington DC.

Security is one of the key differentiators in the products available in the market for video collaboration solutions, and others that are available with free download.

From a quality perspective, one of the things that a lot of people get caught up with when talking about video collaboration is the bandwidth requirement and infrastructure, yet the reality is if all those things do not work to deliver a great quality, people do not use the technology. This then leads to low adoption and utilisation of your own solution. So what businesses should do is choose the solutions that can deliver and guarantee levels of quality so as to encourage high adoption and utilisation.

The UAE market

According to a study by analyst firm Canalys[1], Unified Communications (UC) solutions are being deployed in the UAE to modernise and diversify the economy from being over reliant on commodity exports. Investment in establishing new financial centres, business zones, retail, hospitality, and healthcare and universities to attract students from around the world is high. Due to large geographic distances in the region, investment in video collaboration is increasingly in demand.

We see the UAE as a strategic market with growing and robust business opportunities. We also see it as a business gateway to the wider Middle Eastern region. The UAE is hungry for innovation and to be leading the adoption of cutting edge technology that makes it an attractive market.

Flexible working strategies

There is a growing flexible working initiative around the world, with some governments now requiring companies to offer flexible working environments to employees.

In a recent study, we were pleased to see a growing number of companies looking at flexible working solutions or deploying them already, along with those that had found they actually increased the productivity of their employees by 39%.

The survey also asked about technologies; 70% of companies said that they felt video was critical to a flexible working environment to achieve a high level of productivity. What’s great about video is that it not only drives down costs, it also drives better services. When you allow people a flexible working environment, you actually reduce the requirement that you have for your physical facilities. Not only do you increase your productivity, give expertise access to employees around the world and in a highly collaborative way, you also significantly cut down on your infrastructural company requirements.

The office of the future is very much going to resemble hubs, rather than offices and desks. The employees will be working in a virtual face-to-face world supported by a collaborative hub environment with rooms and tables designed for people to come together from different locations.

Video will become an essential part of that hub environment with flexible working driving completely different working environments. Overall, the encouraging sign from the survey results is how important businesses regard video as a critical part of enabling a truly productive flexible environment.

About Polycom

Polycom is very much focused on integrating video collaboration across the variety of operating systems available. Polycom® RealPresence® video solutions can offer that connectivity by enabling these devices to talk to each other.

Polycom is natively integrated into the Microsoft Lync environment. This means we can also include people who use video collaboration through Microsoft Lync in a meeting with others in video conference rooms and others on tablets and phones.

[1] Canalys study on ‘Cloud, Mobility and Impact on video collaboration’, Q412