Age of Video Has Arrived, But Don’t Stop NowAge of Video Has Arrived, But Don’t Stop Now

Just how much has the coronavirus pandemic made 2020 the year of video for enterprises? Not only are 91% of enterprises using video as part of work from home; 59% are using video for some form of employee social interaction. Furthermore, 94% of enterprises are increasing their spend on video, and 87% are increasing their spend on other collaboration technology systems.

In short, the age of video “is really upon us now,” in the words of Irwin Lazar, VP and service director at Nemertes Research, who presented this and much more data as part of a webinar, “Video Powering the New Digital Workplace—Anywhere.” The webinar was part of the ongoing Enterprise Connect Virtual Bootcamp: Collaboration for the New Reality, an online resource where Enterprise Connect is presenting webinars and hosting other assets aimed at helping enterprises devise their communications strategy in the next phase of the pandemic response.

Nemertes is already finding signs that video deployments are moving beyond putting a Microsoft Teams/Cisco Webex/Zoom-type application on every employee computer. For example, enterprises have already begun customizing their business applications with video; according to Nemertes, 20% are already using this sort of custom video deployment, while another 22% are planning to implement by the end of 2021.

Furthermore, just over half of enterprises surveyed by Nemertes said that COVID-19 had accelerated their development of video applications, with use cases including:

And video is also growing throughout enterprises with the deployment of video content management systems (VCMS), which Nemertes characterizes for use in “capturing, broadcasting, recording, storing, and managing video assets.” (VCMS provider Vbrick sponsored the EC webinar in which Lazar presented Nemertes’ independently-developed data.)

Nemertes found that more than 40% of enterprises either already have deployed VCMS or plan to do so by the end of 2021 (see figure below).

VCMS can manage streaming video, which enterprises are increasingly using for internal broadcasts; these management systems can also take in the video feeds from video meeting apps like Zoom, to give the enterprise a way to get a handle on all of its video. “If you don’t proactively address the need to manage video content, video content ends up everywhere,” Lazar said. “It becomes the wild wild West.”

With this kind of all-encompassing management, enterprises are better able to turn their video content into useful assets — employees can search video meetings to find exactly the discussion they need to hear; and they can also support emerging demands for compliance/governance around video content, Lazar said.

All of this is necessary because video is now necessary, Lazar said. “Video’s core. It is here. It is critical. It’s part of a successful work-from-home strategy.”