Dimension Data unveils world's 'first truly global' managed services for visual communications

Exploding interest in visual communications is accelerating user adoption maturity and speeding up the drive to connect seamlessly to a broad variety of environments, which range from the corporate office, B2B, home and mobile users, and even consumers. As a result, the technology is fast becoming a top priority for IT departments.

Dimension Data's Managed Services for Visual Communications is believed to be the world's first truly global service, as it takes the headache out of video management, because it's focused on maximising end-user adoption, and consequently, return on investment.

Dion Bruyns, Business Development Manager, Visual Communications, Dimension Data Middle East and Arica, says businesses realise that visual communication strategies are imperative to cut costs and improve their sustainability.

“Visual communications services have become a crucial business application thanks to technology that is able to accommodate user demand, even when network quality is diminished or restricted. This is especially true for businesses investing in Africa, which often face connectivity challenges. However, with managed services for visual communications and the declining cost of bandwidth, a renewed level of user comfort is introduced,” he says.

Bruyns says organisations also realise they will require the support of a partner that can ensure not only the smooth and efficient adoption of services, but also a return on their investment in line with cost reduction.

“In fact, user adoption and usage is the number one challenge facing organisations that have invested in video systems. If video doesn't work within what we call the 'golden two minutes' - whether it's a problem with the technology, poor call quality, lack of user education - employees are likely to revert to an alternative method of communication, which is usually the telephone, and they probably won't try it again,” he adds.

Bruyns says organisations need an effective management solution, otherwise their IT departments will struggle to keep up with patches and upgrades, and thus return on investment will be unquantifiable.

“Just keeping the lights on with video requires massive investments in the necessary management platforms, systems, expertise and experience. While it's possible for organisations to handle video in-house, it's very costly, time-consuming, and extremely burdensome for companies that don't manage video as a business.”

Terry Dwyer, Dimension Data Director, Visual Communications, says: “In the past 18 months, we've seen a dramatic rise in interest in video. Many of our clients are re-evaluating their video strategies and beginning to plan and deploy large-scale visual communications strategies. However, they want a single provider to support their needs globally. We thus made the decision to invest in and expand in order to support video globally, since we already had the global footprint, and the services and certifications to support our clients. With Managed Services for Visual Communications, our clients can now offload their entire video estate to Dimension Data to manage, rather than use multiple small, local AV companies.”

Research carried out in 2010 by Dimension Data among 809 US-based respondents revealed that most organisations (66.6%) are choosing to manage video on-premise, with 18.9% going the hosted off-premise route, and 14.6% owned on-premise platform.

Furthermore, many are investing without a strategic roadmap. A startling 49% of those organisations polled said they have no plan, 41% said they have a plan, with the balance (10%) saying that they were investigating the options for deploying video in a UC framework for ubiquitous deployments.

When asked what challenges they expected to face if their company implemented visual communications, 57% of the 809 organisations said cost justification; 55.7% said budget; 43.5% said user adoption; and a whopping 62.5% said bandwidth. Other reasons included executive support (27/1%), IT support (20.1%) and network readiness (36.7%).

The benefits for organisations wanting to use managed videoconferencing services are compelling:

* Focus on core technologies: In most organisations, visual communications is not seen as a mission-critical technology. The adoption of managed services enables IT departments to focus on core mission-critical technologies and out-task the management of the visual communications estate to a third party in a cost-effective manner.

* Reduce operational cost: The adoption of managed services negates the requirement to recruit, train, manage and retain visual communications specialists globally.

* Eliminates cost barriers to entry: Deploying a visual communications infrastructure is expensive and requires a “build it and they will come” approach towards deployment. Managed video services provide a low-cost entry point into visual communications adoption, providing access to a full range of functionality, yet only paying for what the client's enterprise consumes.

* Improved user experience: Traditionally, users have found visual communications to be unreliable and difficult to use. Managed services utilise providers' expertise to ensure that reliability issues are identified and dealt with, and ease of use is optimised to such a level that calls are pre-launched by the Virtual Network Operations Centre (VNOC). Users just need to turn up and meet.

According to Bruyns, there will be a significant uptick in managed video in the next few years. As organisations finalise their global video strategies and tie up their sustainability initiatives, they will need the support of an experienced partner to ensure adoption and enhance their return.

“We will also see more complex commercial models as clients choose to purchase using different models and look for customised consumption models,” says Bruyns, pointing out that there's a fundamental shift in the way businesses are looking to deploy visual communications. “This, in turn, means the experience that clients demand will also shift,” he says.