Are Your Employees Spending More Than 1 Million Minutes Video Conferencing?

If your organization uses between 1-2 million video collaboration minutes per year, you’re definitely not alone. In fact, most large organizations in our recent report (48% with over 10,000 employees), are pushing 1.9 million video collaboration minutes annually and growing. It’s not just the 800-pound gorillas, though. Our data shows that even organizations with less than 1,000 employees on average used 2.1M video minutes. More than the median for organizations with greater than 5,000 employees.

Video Powerhouses

How can this be? There are medium-sized businesses out there fighting way above their weight class, so we like to call them “video collaboration powerhouses”. They’re the organizations that have basically immersed themselves in video communication culture, and their video growth rate has doubled in the last 2 years. You could say someone back in 2013 lit a match, set fire to all legacy communications, and the company never looked back. You might expect this “radical” shift in the way we collaborate to be happening in the SMB’s and mid-sized technology companies, but enterprises across many industries are rapidly adopting video as well.

If you’ve been in the video conferencing industry for a while, like many of us, you’ve witnessed the birth of pervasive enterprise video collaboration in the last few years.

The evolution of video has proved to be quite a spectacle – moving out of the video conferencing boardroom and into the hands of teams across large global organizations. Team collaboration improvements rapidly spread across large organizations, making the organizations more efficient as a whole, reducing costs, decreasing product time to market and dramatically improving communication quality.

Software video clients made it easier to scale, cloud-based UC and VC made it easier to deploy, and hardware endpoints made it easier to meet and interact with teams regardless of where they are on the map. This shift has impacted so much in so little time; revolutionizing enterprise communication and collaboration. A more appropriate question for large organizations out there might be, “Why aren’t you using 1-2 million video minutes annually YET?”

Like any technology that scales rapidly, there is an undeniable need to improve quickly. Video collaboration is no different. Large video deployments, whether it be Cisco, Polycom, Vidyo, Pexip, Acano, Microsoft Lync (S4B), or any combination of these, need to be tracked and monitored to improve quality, ROI and efficiency across the organization. It may sound like a daunting task now (to track a MASSIVE video network with over 1 million annual minutes of calls), but many organizations are discovering the power of analytics for video collaboration.

We’ve been able to learn a lot from these video conferencing powerhouse companies, as well as companies that are completely new to video. The common goals that all seem to share – driving more video adoption, improving quality, user experience and proving return on video investment.

Best Practice from Vyopta

You can’t monitor and improve what you don’t measure. Visibility is key – this means capacity planning, utilization metrics, and reporting.

I will end on this note about my company to give you another key takeaway to share with your IT team. We track and analyze over 300 million video minutes per year across organizations with multi-vendor video environments. Take a look at our new report on enterprise video usage in 2015 for more information (it’s free)