Top 5 video conferencing infrastructure issues

Excellent post on our business partner LifeSize’s blog.

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It’s common to correlate technology hardware with the glitz and glamour of the awesome features it has to offer. Video conferencing technology is no different. In fact, video conferencing technology hardware seemingly always has continual innovations, intuitive features and glitz on top of glamour, especially considering how quickly video conferencing technology is becoming commonplace in many work environments in many industries.

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We love outside-the-box thinking when it comes to everything that goes into technology platforms. We’re interested in the manufacturing phase, the integration phase, the usability phase and the support phase. One thing that’s held true for technology is that it’s always exciting!

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Diana Hyland, the Product Marketing Manager, authored the epitome of outside-the-box thinking with her post below:

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The quickening pace of new video conferencing technologies entering the workplace continues to place added burden on IT teams, who perform everything from complex installations to tech support.

 

Additionally, video communication has shifted from the meeting room to broad network-wide distribution. With an evolving landscape of new infrastructure solutions on the market and limited resources to hire additional staff, IT administrators are often overwhelmed with how to manage their video communications environment.

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We’ve spoken to hundreds of IT administrators and the same complaints seem to pop up over and over.

 

Here are the top 5 problems we have heard all too often.

1. Too Complex: Most video infrastructure is designed as discrete, single-purpose products. IT teams must deploy and monitor each product separately and navigate disparate UIs. This complexity puts a huge tax on IT resources.

2. Limited Deployment Options: While many datacenters have moved to virtualization technologies, a majority of video conferencing products are still delivered as hardware, requiring more space, more power and added equipment cost.

3. Larger Workloads, Limited Resources: While IT teams are tasked with managing more devices in more locations, including laptops and mobile devices, they are also challenged to improve efficiencies across a larger network without adding headcount.

4. Not Scalable: Most video infrastructure products come in fixed capacities that don’t scale, so companies can rarely buy the exact capacity they need or scale as they grow.

5. Difficult to Trial: A typical trial requires ordering, shipping and setting up each device (and for every product you want to trial, it is “rinse and repeat”). The process is costly, slow and inefficient.