If You’re not Doubling Collaboration Every Two Years, You’re not Doing it Right

It’s no secret that Vyopta has collected a LOT of collaboration data.  We have several hundred enterprise customers, monitor over 1 million video endpoints, and over 2 BILLION minutes per year. We’re talking Terrabytes of data with more being added every day. Periodically, we review this data for insights that could be helpful to the industry and customers as a whole.  The majority of these insights will be released in an eBook later this year, but I thought today we could get a sneak preview of some of the best insights regarding adoption trends at large enterprises.

The Data

First of all, we have data from over 300 organizations around the world in a variety of industries, but mostly larger organizations of over 10,000 employees. The total number of employees covered in this analysis (cloud customers only) is just about 4 million people, and includes data from February of 2013 through December 31, 2017.

 

The BIGGEST Adoption insight is this…

Average Meeting Minutes Increased 44%!

To be specific, the average organization grew their total meeting minutes 44% annually. We did this analysis by cohort, meaning we took the average over 4 years of customers who joined in 2013, the average over 3 years of customers who deployed Vyopta in 2014, and so on, up through customers who joined in early 2017.

This is big.  That means that the average Vyopta customer more than doubles the number of meeting minutes where they are using collaboration technology every two years.  Meeting minutes are the count of hosted minutes where a collaboration technology is used.  Total Video (participant) and Audio (participant) minutes each had strong average growth among customers by 40% and 71% respectively.  Side note: I just want to be clear what meeting and participant minutes are and how they are different.

A 1 hour meeting with 4 participants = 60 Meeting minutes and 240 Participant minutes.

We feel that meeting minutes more accurately represents growth in collaboration technology than participant minutes, because participant minutes don’t count physical attendees. In addition, we had customers who grew way faster than this.

Finally, if you want to find out HOW our customers are accomplishing this feat, then read through some recent blogs, study our Webinars or Case Studies, or wait for our next eBook on How to Increase Adoption.

Other Useful Insights

Most collaboration still happens through desk phones. This is trending towards more software but that is not happening as fast as some industry sites would have you believe. While Hardware (Rooms) usage is increasing rapidly, it is not outpacing the general growth of the market. In addition, the ratio of calls from Hardware was higher for our early customers because our software was primarily focused on video collaboration, so we did not collect data from as many phones. In reality, this means that the amount of calls through phones is probably higher even than what we show here. The times are changing though.  The data from just 2017 shows that software is taking more of this pie, and specifically, mobile software is growing rapidly.

Meetings are growing too. At least, meetings that involve some collaboration technology are.  I have been working in technology development for a decade at companies large and small, and I don’t think my number of meetings per day/week/year has increased 40% every year.  It feels like I have pretty much had constant meetings that entire time (too many meetings), so when the data says that is increasing, it MUST be the use of technology that is increasing that heavily. This corresponds to growth in remote workers, collaboration across locations, and the general growth in meetings, so it makes sense to me when you think of it that way.

Stay Tuned for More!

Again, these are just a few of the nuggets from my research.  When we release our eBook, you will see much more detail.  In addition, you can get these metrics customized for your company size and industry so that you can set benchmarks and goals for your use of collaboration technology TODAY by starting a trial of Vyopta.