Big Plans for VideoBig Plans for Video

In this week's VoiceCon Webinar (which you can get to for viewing here), we asked a polling question about what services besides VOIP our audience members planned to deploy across their enterprise WANs. The surprise winner: Video.

In this week's VoiceCon Webinar (which you can get to for viewing here), we asked a polling question about what services besides VOIP our audience members planned to deploy across their enterprise WANs. The surprise winner: Video.Here are the percentages (we asked people to pick just one answer, whichever was their highest priority:

* Video-- 31.9% * Mobile applications--10.3% * Messaging--26.7% * Presence--8.6% * Telepresence--9.5% * Data sharing (collaboration--12.9%

John Bartlett of NetForecast, who was one of our speakers on the Webinar, jumped all over these results. John is an expert on how to run video across the WAN--bandwidth effects, performance challenges and solutions--and he homed right in on the fact that, if you combined the "video" and "telepresence" answers, you get more than 40% of the audience saying that doing some form of WAN video is important to them.

It helps to understand who these folks are, and you can get a good sense of this from how they answered an earlier polling question: At how many sites do you have VOIP deployed beyond the pilot stage:

* 0-1: 35.5% * 2-5: 24.8% * 5-10: 12.4% * 10-50: 15.7% * More than 50: 11.6%

So our respondent profile here is that just over a third of them, the biggest single group out of the choices offered, essentially are doing no wide-area VOIP. Another quarter of them have VOIP at 5 or fewer sites. So about 60% have fairly limited or no wide-area VOIP deployed.

On the other hand, more than a quarter have VOIP deployed at more than 10 sites, and 11.6% have pretty big deployments in progress. So this audience looks pretty close to where the market as a whole is, maybe a little on the leading edge given those >50-site numbers.

From this and other anecdotal evidence, like attendance at VoiceCon sessions, I'm seeing a lot more interest in video than I'd expected. What's going on where you are?