UC
Polycom had a busy week, buying Accordant Technologies for $50 million and also announcing a partnership with Motorola to enable Xoom users to participate in enterprise video conferences. Taken together these announcements highlight a couple of key trends we are seeing in our research, namely the rapid growth of video streaming/capture/sharing in the enterprise, and the growing need to support mobile users as part of an enterprise collaboration strategy.
Approximately 49% of companies are deploying tools for internal video collaboration, streaming and storage, with another 24% evaluating for future rollout. Meanwhile, mobility planning is front and center for many IT managers, with 43% of firms increasing their mobility spend in 2010, a trend we expect to rapidly increase in 2011 as companies not only respond to growing employee demand for smartphones and tablets, but begin to investigate the opportunity to leverage new mobile devices to improve business processes and deliver new internal and customer facing services.
Bottom line: IT managers need to change their thinking about mobile devices and video. Incorporate mobile capabilities into your product evaluation and architecture plans while delivering capabilities to allow employees to create, share, and collaborate on their own video creations.
