"Our philosophy at Cat is you don't start your day with Wheaties.You start it with the Cat portal," says Gus Otto, who manages business-collaboration infrastructure for the $23 billion-per-year industrial equipment manufacturer in Peoria, Ill.
Caterpillar is integrating video-specific portals with business-unit portals and the company's intranet home page. From Caterpillar's portals, users can watch "Background News," a daily company newscast. A communications tab provides access to executive speeches and corporate communications. Just as advertisers use television to capture the attention of consumers, Caterpillar uses the video portal to grab employees. "You have to have engaged employees to continue to increase your bottom line," Otto says. "This new way to deliver content is increasing engagement."
Citigroup, the New York financial services company, is revamping and expanding its approach to video communications as a way of making employees more productive, saving money and even making money. The changes focus on creating, distributing and displaying video on business-unit portals. "We have thought through the entire technological chain associated with video," says Tony Raimundo, Citigroup's senior vice president for digital media and collaboration technologies. "We standardized how people create, distribute and watch video."
The goal for the company is to enhance more than 400 Citigroup internal portals with live and archived video. Rather than force viewers to watch content on a specialized video portal, Citigroup delivers content to the virtual space in which people work. "My fixed-income division does business all day long on their portal. We're adding video to that portal," Raimundo says.
"The trend toward video portals is significant," says Andrew Davis, a senior analyst with Wainhouse Research. "It straddles two worlds that are colliding - conferencing portals and content management portals."
Conferencing portals let users schedule and launch videoconferences and Web conferences.
Content management portals provide the ability to search key words and pull up a variety of data types including images, video, documents, slides and audio.
"Suppose I'm working with you and three other guys developing a new coffee cup. You've got the specification document. Someone else took photos of competing coffee cups. There's a streaming video of the CEO of a competitor talking about the coffee cup market. I want to be able to go to an integrated portal and see all of that content," Davis says.
Oracle uses a dual approach to video portals. Besides creating a one-stop-shopping portal for all video content, Oracle also is including much of that content in existing portals. "We have a comprehensive rich media portal that has also been stripped across other organizational portals like the North American sales portal and the government, education and healthcare portal," says Nathaniel Robinson, who runs a video production and distribution service group within Oracle.
The Redwood Shores, Calif., company launched the group five years ago after realizing the cost per attendee of streamed video presentations is $2.50 compared with $350 per attendee at a hotel. Robinson's group has deployed a homegrown universal player that provides a video/audio window, a data window and a browser displaying links to related content.
Oracle also uses video-logger technology from Virage, now a division of Autonomy. The Virage product logs each video clip, creates an index from the audio and allows keyword searches so that users can retrieve content. "The rich media adds this element - people are very familiar with their TV and respond well to it," Robinson says. "Video is such an engaging experience, and the retention is so much better than sending someone a Web page."
While e-learning has been the most compelling use of video for many companies, video portals are giving them the opportunity to create an order-of-magnitude shift in corporate communications. Used effectively, video can capture employees by entertaining and informing them. Because users can access all video content from a business-unit portal or video-specific portal, corporate communicators can generate "stickiness" for messages by putting critical content where it will be viewed.
Some videoconferencing rooms rapidly are becoming content-creation facilities thanks to videoconferencing-to-streaming gateway hardware from a company called Starbak. Early customers include Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon subsidiary, Lockheed Martin and the Common Fund, a Wilton, Conn., mutual fund company.
The gateway, a hardware appliance, "gives the videoconference legs," says Arthur Landry, the Common Fund's voice-and-video manager, by converting it to a Windows Media stream that can be included on video portals or put on a DVD. "Any videoconference we do we can archive to a streaming server," he says. "That includes everything [in the audio and video] as well as the associated PowerPoint."
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