Three Big Trends Reshaping Video Communications

Published 7/2/2012

David Danto

Principal Consultant - AV / Multimedia / Video / UC,

Dimension Data

Director of Emerging Technology, IMCCA

People sometimes fantasize about being a rock musician in the 60s or having an Internet startup in the 90s. If you stop to think about it, is there any other time you’d want to be in our collaboration industry? The huge amount of technology innovations emerging are facilitating tremendous, positive change in how people communicate, work, and live -- and this is only just starting.

In the coming weeks and months you can expect me to discuss a number of trends that I believe represent the direction of our industry. This list includes:

Pervasive video: What happens to society when video collaboration is available everywhere and to everyone?
Why do you live where you live? Is it primarily to be close to a good job? What happens to your criteria when you can work anywhere using collaboration tools? Maybe you no longer choose to live near the big city. Maybe schools or quality of life become your primary factors.

As an employer, you can now look to recruit from anywhere -- not just in the geography of your offices. These are profound changes that will have a long-lasting impact on our lives. It’s definitely time for the sales organizations in our industry to stop talking about the always questionable and self-serving metrics regarding “travel avoidance savings” and start talking about this.

Mobility: What does “anything anywhere” mean?
It took Apple three years to sell 10 million iPods. It sold 10 million iPhones in only two years. It sold 10 million iPads in only nine months.

What does it mean to society when we carry full access with us at all times? What will it mean to be “at work”? Am I at work when I’m watching my kids play ball but forwarding a presentation update to my team or answering a client’s question? We’re going to have to come up with some new ways of looking at things.

The cloud: How will both virtualization and the new consumption models change collaboration?
Are the traditional hardware manufacturers “dead,” as has been written in some recent blogs, or were those just self-serving predictions by the alternative product manufacturers? Are we at a transition point where hardware devices are giving way to software applications? What are the security implications of moving our intellectual property to a public cloud service? And why does it have to be a public cloud at all when provider firms can set up your selected hardware using your selected architecture on your own premises? Call it a “private cloud,” thereby changing your consumption and pricing model and making it “video-as-a-service.”

These are what I think will be the hottest topics in our industry over the next few months, so expect to see me writing about them in more detail. Of course, one never exactly knows what’s around the next corner, so I’ll be sure to let everyone know about things that surprise me.

As always, feel free to comment and let me know what you’re thinking. Let’s all stay in touch to figure out what’s going on.

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This blog was written by David Danto and contains solely his own, personal opinions. It originally was published at UBM’s “The Video Enterprise” website that was closed down November 1^st 2012. Here is a link to the Google cache of the page with comments. I do not know how long Google keeps these pages.

David has over 30 years of experience providing problem solving leadership and innovation in media and unified communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds including AT&T, Bloomberg LP, FNN, Morgan Stanley, NYU, Lehman Brothers and JP Morgan Chase. He recently joined Dimension Data as their Principal Consultant for the collaboration, multimedia, video and AV disciplines. He is also the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology. David can be reached at David.Danto@Dimensiondata.com or DDanto@imcca.org, he can be followed on Twitter @NJDavidD , and his full bio and other blogs and articles can be seen at Danto.info.