evolution of business video
TRANSCRIPT
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
The New Ideal Model for Business Video 2
The History of Video Technology 3
New Uses Becoming Mainstream 3
Huddle Rooms 3
Video Contact Centers 4
Video Kiosks 4
Business-to-Business (B2B) 4
Recording and Streaming 4
Helping CIOs Meet Today’s Video Expectations 4
Solution Spotlight: BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud 5
BlueJeans Security 6
BlueJeans Command Center 7
BlueJeans Relay 7
BlueJeans Primetime 7
BlueJeans Slack and HipChat Integration 8
BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud Benefits 8
Conclusion 8
About the Author 9
About BlueJeans Network 9
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 2
Introduction
Technologies evolve at differing paces. Some technologies develop at a rock-steady pace, such as
processors whose speeds have increased following the pace dictated by Moore’s Law1 for decades.
Other technologies leap forward. For example, remote controlled planes a few years ago weren’t much
better than the toys of my childhood, but suddenly we have drones that can perform impossible
acrobatics and aerial feats.
Business video technology has long suffered from a glacial pace of development. From the introduction of
the first AT&T Picturephone2 at the 1964 World’s Fair to the early 2000s, we saw very little in the way of
improvement in terms of usability and mass adoption. There were plenty of incremental advances that
were heralded in their time, each of which promised to enable ubiquitous video conferencing. However,
none of them were able to really create the video magic needed to convert the typical business
communicator away from the telephone. Video over ISDN, universal connectivity video bridges, 720p
video, telepresence, SVC, and hosted services all deserve credit for being remarkable advances in
technology. Unfortunately, video continued to be a special event product, not a mainstream daily
communication tool.
However, in the last few years we have experienced a burst of evolution. A fortunate convergence of
hardware advances, software developments, bandwidth availability, and cultural acceptance has changed
everything. As a result, not only have business video products and solutions dramatically improved, but
the very way we use and think about video has been turned on its head.
The New Ideal Model for Business Video
The new model for business video deployments is a flexible video cloud optimized for enterprise, such as
the BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud described in the solution spotlight below. This is a new set of
services designed to support today’s video expectations and it’s a far cry from the appliance-based video
model of the past. The Enterprise Video Cloud approach meets both the requirements of users and IT
support in a number of ways. Consumer-like user interfaces and almost no learning curve lends itself to
easy use. It’s simple to deploy and manage, as it includes proper analytics and IT portal controls.
The BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud model for business video can easily be integrated with user
workflows. Rather than asking users to walk to the meeting room to use video, it can be added to any
user workspace. In other words, bringing the tools to the users, rather than asking users to change their
workflow in order to access the tools.
Finally, Enterprise Video Cloud still meets all the checkmark requirements of the previous generation of
business video. It’s scalable, globally available, secure, and customizable. We don’t want to start over
with video. We just want another level of flexibility, accessibility, and power. Before we delve further into
the nature of today’s ideal business video solution, let’s take a look at the seismic shift in business video
use over the last few years.
____________________________________________________________________________________ 1 http://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2016-03-12/after-moores-law 2 http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/70picture.html
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 3
The History of Video Technology
In the beginning, business video technology was a product locked down to a meeting room. This was
unfortunate and limiting for a number of reasons. The first and most obvious issue is that if video systems
only exist in meeting rooms, video calls can only occur from one meeting room to another. This isn’t a
normal part of our business communications workflow. The typical meeting room communication problem
is that one or two regular meeting attendees aren’t able to make it to the meeting room and need to call in
on the phone. That’s the problem that needed to be solved by video.
In the middle ages of video, we incrementally improved these meeting room systems. Quality and
reliability improved, as additional features were added. This generation of systems offered powerful
capabilities, like recording and content sharing. The solutions were also more user-friendly. While we
weren’t quite at the “click to join” stage yet, they no longer required an IT specialist to schedule calls days
in advance.
In recent years, we finally started hitting the mark. Business video solutions finally started to solve the
fundamental communication problem of the workplace, (i.e. the limitations of the telephone) without
asking users to change their workflow. We no longer had to walk from our desks to a meeting room to call
into another meeting room. We can make a video call right from our desktops or mobile devices to the
meeting room. As a result of this new level of flexibility, even by 2010, a Nemertes Research study
reported that up to 77% of organizations surveyed were using room-based videoconferencing, with up to
52% using desktop videoconferencing.3
New Uses Becoming Mainstream
Today, we are viewing video as an application, rather than as a product. As a result, video users are
taking this technology in previously unseen directions. In other words, when video was sold as a meeting
room tool, we used it as a meeting room tool. Now that video is being offered as a flexible technology,
through models such as BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud, we’re more flexible in our application of this
technology.
Huddle Rooms
Today, the biggest trend in business video is the huddle room. While this isn’t a dramatic departure from
the traditional meeting room dynamic, it does differ in several significant aspects. One major difference is
the matter of who we call. With traditional meeting room video, it was one meeting room connecting to
another meeting room. As discussed above, this simply wasn’t a problem needing to be solved. The real
need for video was to upgrade the phone call, and that is what’s happening in huddle rooms.
This higher level of engagement is crucial because the types of meetings that often occur in huddle
rooms are vastly different than the traditional meeting room dynamic. Today’s huddle rooms are hosting
true working sessions. Rather than simply providing status on work, the teams are doing the work
collaboratively during the meeting itself. For this type of interactive session, a phone call won’t suffice.
____________________________________________________________________________________ 3 http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com/feature/Video-conferencing-adoption-Tracking-trends-and-deployment-strategies
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 4
Video Contact Centers
At long last, we’re finally starting to see the rise of video contact centers. One of the great frustrations of
the modern era is calling customer service and wading through the endless menu systems to finally be
connected to a voice call with a service agent. There’s no feeling of human connection, no feeling that the
service agent sees you as a human being and actually cares about helping you. The addition of face-to-
face interaction will certainly help this situation.
Video Kiosks
Banks, credit unions, and car rental companies have been rolling out trials of video kiosks recently, with
early results meeting or exceeding expectations. While the convenience and higher service levels are
obvious from the customer standpoint, the benefits to the kiosk owners are even more convincing. It
perfectly solves the problem of distributing human resources where needed at any given time. How often
have you walked into a bank or car rental office and seen one agent trying to serve a long line of
customers? On the flip side, how many times have you seen multiple agents in an office standing idly
around with no customers to serve? By connecting these agents to kiosks, every idle agent can now be
helping customers in locations where there are more customers than available agents.
Business-to-Business (B2B)
Another long awaited use of business video is business-to-business (B2B) communications. If we
appreciate the value of true face-to-face communications with our team members, it only makes sense
that we would want that same level of engagement and impact when working with our external partners
and clients. In the past, this was too hard due to security and firewall issues, but today’s enterprise-ready
cloud services make it very simple.
Recording and Streaming
While the focus of business video is generally on interactive sessions, we shouldn’t ignore the importance
of recorded or streamed video. In the past, organizations created massive DVD libraries to house their
training videos and presentations at great expense. The flexibility and affordability of cloud video not only
makes it easier to manage and store our video resources, but also easier to create them. As a result,
recorded videos are no longer the sole domain of a specialized video production team. These videos can
help with business processes such as field worker support, security, training, and more. In fact, a recent
Nemertes study showed that almost 58% of participants have active programs underway to evaluate
video's use in improving specific business processes.4
Helping CIOs Meet Today’s Video Expectations
Unfortunately for today’s CIOs, our user expectations are slightly outpacing technology development.
Despite the new way of thinking about video as a feature, for the most part, video technology is still being
offered in product form. You can still buy productized meeting room systems, streaming solutions,
recording solutions, etc. However, users want video support for ever-new applications and want it
immediately. While this is possible, it often requires a lot of creativity and customization. In order to fully
meet this new level of user expectations, we have to free video from its product-locked past and offer a
true, next generation business video model.
____________________________________________________________________________________ 4 http://www.nojitter.com/post/240171038/video-conferencing-hot--getting-hotter
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 5
The challenge to today’s CIO can be seen by closely examining the new use cases listed above. The
common theme running through these examples is that they’re based on thinking about video as a
technology, application, or feature. This is dramatically different than the old product-based way of selling
and using video. As an analogy, think about Elon Musk’s revolutionary new battery technology. In the first
generation, he only sold them as an integrated element of his Tesla car. Therefore, these batteries were
only used for driving. Now that he’s decoupled the battery from the car, it’s being mounted in homes to
serve as backup power and enhance the efficiency of home energy use. We can expect to see many
other uses for this technology in the future, as it becomes more flexible and available for other
applications. Our enterprise CIOs need this same kind of flexibility from video technology.
In addition, flexibility, accessibility, and usability must be addressed to support new use cases. In the
early days, video was very much an IT tool. A specially trained expert technician was required to manage
video tools and assets. Today’s video applications are designed to be easy and even enjoyable to use.
The model is our consumer video applications. It's no accident that our business video recording portals
are starting to look very much like YouTube. Many even mimic the YouTube workflow dynamic regarding
how we upload, store, and share our video recordings. Video meeting software is also taking on a very
user-friendly appearance, with almost no training required to create meetings and manage in-meeting
controls. All of this greatly helps CIOs create video applications to meet new user expectations.
The last piece of making this new world of video applications accessible to today’s workers is vastly
increasing the reach and scope of video. Bringing video from the boardroom to the desktop was a huge
leap in accessibility. However, now we’re going even beyond that. By supporting browser-based video
(via WebRTC or plugins), we’ve eliminated the need for client downloads which are often blocked or not
supported by workplace IT departments. Extending even further to mobile devices, we’ve finally realized
the long denied dream of ubiquitous video.
However, this reach would be meaningless without the support of truly scalable infrastructure. If your
video meetings are hosted on a physical server which only supports 10 meetings at a time, you can’t
really offer video to 1,000 employees, regardless of the availability of browser-based and mobile video
apps. By shifting the infrastructure from on-premise hardware to cloud services, we’ve solved the final
problem of video scalability. This scalability is the final piece of the puzzle for the new model of business
video designed to enable today’s CIO to meet our new user expectations.
Solution Spotlight: BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud
BlueJeans Network is an industry leader in business video, having changed the very face of enterprise
communications with its cloud interop service. The word “disrupter” is a bit overused in the video industry,
but BlueJeans is a textbook disrupter and category creator. They don’t just have a history of improving
upon existing video technology, they are true game changers with offerings like Command Center,
Primetime, BlueJeans Relay, and their leading web-based user interface.
BlueJeans entered the industry as a neutral middle ground between various video vendors and services.
Its ability to connect Skype calls to traditional H.323 systems was unheard of at the time and a big part of
opening up the closed world of meeting room videoconferencing. They started with a solid global network
to ensure that their customers can enjoy stable and reliable calls, even over public Internet.
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 6
BlueJeans soon realized that their users wanted something more than a connection service and were
ready for the next generation of the user experience. BlueJeans met this challenge by creating their
browser-based endpoint. The BlueJeans user experience has a consumer-facing look and feel. It’s
intuitive, easy to use, and even “pretty”, which makes accessible and enjoyable. This was an immediate
hit with users, with large percentages of BlueJeans meetings including callers using the new client and
enjoying the new BlueJeans experience. Since that time, the user interface has been continuously
improved and remains one of the leading and most popular caller interfaces in business video.
BlueJeans Security
From day one, BlueJeans intended to build an enterprise-ready service. Security is a primary
consideration for any enterprise application and BlueJeans takes it very seriously.
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 7
BlueJeans call security includes:
Dial out to prevent hackers from logging in to your video systems and watch meetings take place
in your conference rooms
Visible and audible alerts anytime someone joins or leaves a call
The ability to password protect and lock a meeting after everyone has joined
Forced encryption to ensure only encrypted endpoints can join a meeting
Admin controls and settings to ensure your optimal level of protection is being met
Intelligent firewall and NAT detection
SOC2 compliance
In addition, BlueJeans offers advanced security features on a network, cloud architecture, application,
administrative, data storage, and media handling level. For more information, please see this BlueJeans
Network security technical guide.
BlueJeans Command Center
Another key differentiator, between a consumer and enterprise
grade solution, is the inclusion of analytics and management
tools. BlueJeans Command Center provides IT administrators
with the power to fully manage their video deployment. Over 70
performance metrics give IT the real time feedback they need to
support their users and track ROI for executives. BlueJeans
Command Center was recently upgraded to give IT the ability to
not only observe and track, but to actively control meetings.
Troubleshooting in real time, during the course of a meeting,
helps to prevent meeting failures.
BlueJeans Relay
BlueJeans has continuously released new (often leading/category defining) enterprise applications and
integrations. BlueJeans Relay brings their experience to meeting room systems, such as those made by
Cisco, Logitech, and most H.323/SIP solutions. By dedicating a typical Android tablet to a meeting room,
users can join meetings in a single click. This is a great usability improvement from the standard IP dialing
dynamic of meeting room systems. It also offers calendar integration (Microsoft Exchange and Google),
which displays upcoming meetings for one-click join.
BlueJeans Primetime
In addition to tools designed to improve typical videoconferencing sessions, BlueJeans has developed its
technology to support new ways of meeting over video. BlueJeans Primetime helped to create a new
category of online events. Unlike a typical webinar, an attendee at a BlueJeans Primetime session can be
“promoted” to presenter status, sharing his/her video with the entire audience. The result is a new kind of
interactive, collaborative event. This dramatically changes the nature of virtual town halls, training events,
HR onboarding, investor relations, marketing, public announcements, and much more. For more
information, please see this white paper on the new online event.
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 8
BlueJeans Slack and HipChat Integration
BlueJeans understands that today’s workflows are ever-changing and is determined to make video a
seamless part of any workplace culture. With this in mind, they developed an integration for the incredibly
popular Slack and HipChat services. Slack is the fastest growing business application in history, and its
grassroots growth is a testament to the fact that users will choose and adopt what works best for them.
By simply typing “/bluejeans” in any Slack or HipChat channel, users can instantly escalate from chat to
high definition video. This is yet another example of how the Enterprise Video Cloud conforms to your
choice of workflow.
BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud Benefits
By deploying the BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud, companies realize benefits far beyond those
expected from the typical videoconferencing solution. These benefits include:
Video culture optimization
Video platform which conforms to user’s workstyles
High levels of customization
Command Center management
Enterprise-grade security throughout
Professional services and support
Extensible architecture
Consistent user experience platform-wide
Conclusion
In recent years, we’ve reached the final stages of becoming a video-ready society. Culturally, video is no
longer merely a tool for executive meetings and a toy for video enthusiasts. At a consumer level, we
record our daily lives on YouTube and share live streams using services such as Periscope. This has
created new expectations for business video. We’re no longer satisfied by locked down meeting room
products. We’ve seen the massive ROI of business video in the boardroom and want to achieve similar
results throughout the enterprise, from our desktops to our mobile devices, to our Slack channels.
The days of walking down the hall to the meeting room in order to use video are coming to an end. In
order to fully realize the potential benefits of business video, it needs to have the flexibility and ingenuity
provided by a true enterprise video cloud offering. BlueJeans Network is the industry disruptor, innovator,
and category creator who led the business world into the era of cloud interoperability. Now BlueJeans is
further pushing business video from its locked down, product-based past, into the application and
workflow-based future of ubiquitous face-to-face communications.
While the BlueJeans Enterprise Video Cloud may have a user-friendly interface and attractive consumer-
like appearance, it still has the full enterprise-ready feature set, with the security and IT tools that
distinguish it from competitive solutions which are limited to SMB applications. The greater impact,
engagement, and proven ROI of business video have long been established. Now it’s available in a
flexible and accessible service ready to meet your business needs. Business video is no longer a “nice to
have” technology, but an essential tool to keep your teams’ development on schedule and ahead of the
competition. The time is now to either join in the Enterprise Video Cloud stage of business video
evolution, or get left behind.
© 2016 Let’s Do Video Page 9
About the Author
David Maldow is the Founder and CEO of Let's Do Video (LDV) and one of the
visual collaboration industry's most prolific writers. Prior to founding Let’s Do
Video, David was Managing Partner at Telepresence Options, one of the
industry’s most recognized print publication and news sites. It was there that he
authored 150+ pieces of public content, gaining him recognition as an industry
expert. Earlier in his career, David managed the Wainhouse Research Video
Test Lab, where he developed the ability to assess products/solutions from an
IT perspective, but with an eye for user experience and adoptability.
Let's Do Video is a news website covering business video technologies and strategies. Founded in July
2014 by David Maldow, LDV's mission is to provide third-party, informative, educational content and news
to the visual collaboration community. LDV is more than the typical industry resource, adding intense
thought leadership to the best public facing industry coverage on the web.
About BlueJeans Network
At BlueJeans Network, we create video experiences that
people love, and are also trusted by the IT organizations of
the world’s leading brands. Video communications is an
immersive experience that enables employees to work more
collaboratively and make businesses more efficient. BlueJeans offers interactive, multi-directional visual
communication services through a cloud-based platform that is trusted by the Fortune 100. This gives
peace of mind to IT leaders and unleashes the workforce to be their best, wherever they are in the world.
BlueJeans Network is a private company headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more
information go to: www.bluejeans.com or follow the company @BlueJeansNet