Value-Added Benefits of Video Collaboration

You may recall, we've reported on the compelling cost savings associated with TelePresence service usage. It's proven to be a key motivator for increasing adoption. That said, a new market study has uncovered value-added benefits -- such as building trust, improving group collaboration, and increasing competitive advantage.

Cisco unveiled the findings of a global study of perceptions of video collaboration technologies in the workplace. The research, conducted by Ipsos Mori, polled an international sample of workers from across 12 countries and found that the benefits of TelePresence and video conferencing are extending well beyond the highly touted benefits of cost and travel reduction.

Among the key findings, 90 percent of respondents believe video collaboration saves them at least two hours of valuable work time a week. One-third of respondents who frequently use video collaboration solutions estimate they save close to one full day -- seven hours or more -- per week.

That adds up to more than two months of time a single employee can gain back over the course of a year.

The Ipsos Mori market study highlights include:

• Although both users and nonusers recognize the value of video collaboration technologies (76 vs. 60 percent, respectively), workers who frequently use the technology overwhelmingly value some of the qualitative benefits more than nonusers; for example, increasing competitive advantage (73 percent of frequent users vs. 42 percent of nonusers), bringing people closer together (71 percent of frequent users vs. 40 percent of nonusers), and improving work-life balance (70 percent of frequent users vs. 37 percent of nonusers).
• All respondents, including users and nonusers, agree that video collaboration enhances the communication experience when they are working from home (68 percent), helps maintain operations if work is disrupted (67 percent), improves group collaboration (67 percent), reduces confusion (67 percent), and projects a forward-looking view of an organization (64 percent).
• Globally, the highest percentage of workers who believe they can experience time savings of seven hours or more per week is China (46 percent). 20 percent of Russian workers report they are able to save more than seven hours per week through the use of video collaboration and telepresence.
• More than half (56 percent) of the respondents in China use video collaboration technology, more than double the respondents of any other country.
• More than two-thirds (68 percent) of all respondents perceive environmental benefits to using video collaboration technology, either through enhancing environmental responsibility or as a benefit of reduced travel. Across all 12 markets, at least half of the workers see some environmental benefit.
• One-third of those polled who are not currently using video collaboration solutions say they would be likely to do so if it were available to them. The percentage of workers who have the technology available but do not currently use it is much higher in France (54 percent) than other markets, such as the United States. (21 percent), Sweden (13 percent), Germany (13 percent) and Spain (13 percent).

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Managed Cloud Services for Enterprise Collaboration

Managed cloud services can accelerate your business by allowing you to transform ideas into marketable products and services with greater speed. Cloud can provide nearly limitless scalability, enabling your business to grow without time and resource intensive IT build-outs.

Cloud can transform the economics of your IT -- from capital-intensive, to pay-as-you-go. Service level agreements guarantee the capabilities you need, when you need them. Costs are tiered and metered to accurately reflect your requirements and usage.

All applications, including legacy, run more efficiently and sustainably with greater utilization of the underlying infrastructure.

Cloud can make new business models possible and unlock revenue potential. Companies can enter new markets, respond more quickly to changing customer needs, collaborate more effectively to drive innovation and business value.

Collaboration Use-Case Scenario

• Global organizations face real collaboration challenges. Employee expertise is distributed across headquarters and regional and branch locations around the world. Technology and travel limit responsiveness to customer needs. Cultural differences hamper internal teamwork and organizational agility.
• Enterprise-wide collaboration is particularly difficult to improve due to the communications silos created by existing infrastructure and disparate technology environments.
• Rich collaboration enables organizations to extend services reach and improve relationships with customers. Poor collaboration can result in customer dissatisfaction and competitive exposure.

Role for Cloud Technologies

• Cloud network-based collaboration strategies enable employees at all levels of the organization to connect and collaborate.
• Collaboration services built in the Cloud can also integrate with and enhance business processes and applications.

Application Considerations

• Proper collaboration architecture design relies on a thorough understanding of technology, people, and processes. The architecture must also be able to integrate with the desired business applications and processes.
• High-quality collaboration experiences require end-to-end solutions.

However, Cloud is neither an instantaneous nor simple transformation, but can be adopted in a controlled and pragmatic way. Cloud involves new technologies, new service and deployment models, and new IT skills sets and processes. Migration of legacy applications to Cloud can be a real challenge. That said, legacy platforms can co-exist with Cloud deployments and be migrated only as appropriate.

Moreover, Cloud does not always offer the best business solution. Some Cloud solutions limit the ability to customize functionality or cannot guarantee quality of service. Some workloads may have stringent compliance or technical requirements that demand other approaches.

Organizations will need to determine where Cloud applications are most appropriate, based on workload-specific requirements around cost, risk, and performance.

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Global Alliance Paves Way for Enterprise Cloud Services

Orange Business Services together with Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a business alliance, called Flexible 4 Business -- to offer end-to-end cloud computing services for enterprises. This business alliance will help customers easily transition to cloud computing and gain the infrastructure flexibility, cost reduction and business performance optimization cloud computing enables.

Orange Business Services will be the service provider for the business alliance and will deliver the four types of pay-per-use managed cloud solutions based on the industry-leading technologies from the four partners.

Through Orange Business Services cloud portfolio supported by the Flexible 4 Business alliance, enterprises can realize the benefits of having IT as a service without the concern of building their own cloud computing infrastructure. Through a single service provider, customers will be able to accelerate the deployment of highly secure cloud services across their enterprise while reducing management complexity.

Orange Business Services is certified at the highest level by Cisco, EMC, and VMware to bring the network, server, storage, virtualization and management expertise necessary to integrate the entire cloud solution on a global basis. As the service provider in all Flexible 4 Business engagements, Orange Business Services will commit to tiered end-to-end service level agreements (SLAs).

"Orange Business Services has a long heritage in providing managed datacenter services and hosting and has combined this with its networking and security expertise to provide a growing suite of cloud computing services," said Peter Hall, principal analyst at Ovum.

"The Flexible 4 Business alliance brings together leading players in cloud computing so enterprises can have the confidence that solutions, including private cloud, are delivered and managed on a global scale to the highest standards."

Managed Cloud Services offered by Flexible 4 Business:

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS):
Private cloud: Customized solutions based on Vblock Infrastructure Packages that combine best-in-class virtualization, networking, computing, storage, security, and management technologies from Cisco, EMC and VMware, together with a comprehensive service catalogue (computing, storage, operating systems, middleware) based on platforms hosted in Orange datacenters, sub-parties datacenters or in customers datacenters. The related services are managed by Orange Business Services on an "as-a-service" mode enabling the expected flexibility in a highly secured environment. Back-up services: Highly secure hosted and managed back-up solution delivered as-a-service: evolving and charged according to real usage, enabling customers to benefit from an effective solution that grows with their requirement and does not require initial investments.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS):
Security services: Enable the ability to offer anti-virus and URL filtering solutions as-a-service. These SaaS solutions enable all users to benefit from immediate protection even when out of the office, and for customers to roll out precise security policies within seconds. Unified communications services: Comprehensive unified communications solution hosted and managed from Orange Business Services datacenters to reduce costs. Services are available from all types of terminals. Administrators can allocate services as required and therefore adapt usage and costs to the precise needs of the company.

"Cloud computing has truly come of age with Flexible 4 Business," said Vivek Badrinath, chief executive officer, Orange Business Services. "Today's business alliance will make cloud computing a reachable reality for global enterprises, providing for our customers' security requirements and mitigating the complexity of technical migration. Orange Business Services has built its reputation catering to the global business needs of multinationals. With industry's top cloud players we will ease the migration for our enterprise customers."

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