Throw open the boardroom doors. Videoconferencing is making a dash to to the huddle room, your desktop, and the cloud. In Forrester’s new Vendor Landscape: Videoconferencing Platforms we look at videoconferencing market trends and the 15 vendors that support the space.

 

Videoconferencing is a must have for employee experience. It drives hard cost savings with travel reductions and decreased time to market and soft savings with employees–particularly remote workers–who are more engaged. Global software decision makers aren’t in the dark about the benefits of videoconferencing as its implementation has been outpaced only by IP telephony.

 

There are three key reasons that have driven videoconferencing out of the boardroom including:

 

Hosted services. More than ever, organizations favor cloud or hosted services for videoconferencing. Less than a quarter of global telecommunications decision-makers today would choose to roll out videoconferencing on-premises (see graphic below). That's down from a whopping 40% in 2014, according to Forrester's Business Technographics data. The shift to the cloud means that enterprises can expand and scale videoconferencing to employees who might not otherwise be able to take advantage of it. Cloud deployments also remove most of the burden from IT and white glove services that have traditionally needed to support videoconferences.

 

WebRTC. Many of the vendors we profiled in our vendor landscape support WebRTC, which will help drive the adoption of VC by allowing participants to join through their browsers. WebRTC reduces the friction in starting and joining videoconferences by eliminating the need for downloaded plug ins.

 

Mobile device support. The ability to videoconference from a smartphone or tablet is a flavor of the technology that many vendors support. Where we see additional promise is in using mobile devices and their familiar interfaces to replace clunky room controllers. This supports the way employees want to work and embrace the growing BYOD (bring your own device) trend inside enterprises.

 

Which videoconferencing vendors are you using and how has your strategy changed? Comment below or find me on Twitter. Forrester clients: Want to learn more? Book an inquiry with me.