If two recent reports are any indication, video is quickly becoming crucial to enterprise communications. According to a report by Dell’Oro Group, annual revenues for the Unified Communications market will outpace the enterprise voice market through 2014. While there are many important features included in a UC solution (including voice), video is a prominent component that helps differentiate a UC product from one that only includes voice.

In addition, GIPS released a survey last week of 1,200 business professionals in the US and Asia regarding their use of video conferencing, and discovered some surprising results. Among the findings:

-          In three of the four countries surveyed, a majority of respondents had participated in a video conference or video chat.

-          79% of those who use video conferencing technology rely on consumer applications.

-          The most common reason that participants gave for using video conferencing was to communicate and understand others more clearly and effectively.

-          Video delay and freezing continue to be technical concerns for many users.

If you are interested in reading the entire report, you can find it here.

Last week’s webinar on HD Voice talked about the fundamental requirements to provide high definition voice over IP (VoIP): wideband codecs and the technology to overcome delay, jitter, echo and packet loss, which are intrinsic problems with IP networks. While the codec is a crucial element of HD voice, alone, it is not the panacea for solving IP network challenges.

GIPS gathered some interesting statistics on people’s experience (or lack of experience) with HD voice from the webinar that I would like to share.

A great feature of a survey is the ability to dispel, confirm or surprise you. 186 people responded to the webinar survey and I was surprised at the percentage of people who have not experienced HD Voice – over 60 percent of the professionals who participated. Only 11 percent use it whenever possible. My personal opinion is that once people come into contact with HD voice, they will wonder why they tolerated such bad telephone call quality in the first place.

90 percent of people thought that the benefit of HD voice in conference calls and overall productivity will have the biggest impact, I couldn’t agree more. Conference fatigue – is not something a person generally thinks about. How many conference calls have you participated in where you can’t hear the other person, voices get garbled or you just tune out? Let’s be honest we’ve all experienced it. Hearing the difference is essential whether it’s a regular business or conference call.

The last question was interesting for me because 16 percent think HD-Voice will make an impact in call centers. I was happy to read that because I often have a terrible call-quality experience with call centres be it here or abroad. HD voice (VoIP) will clearly provide immediate benefits to call centres worldwide especially in the increasingly globalized economy.  I think the survey participants had it correct that HD voice will have a major impact on conference calls and video conference calls. Looking back on the survey though, I wish I had put in a choice for mobile phones.  Mobile phone call quality is probably the worst call quality of all, yet it’s probably where we spend much of our time chatting. For me the impact on mobile phones would be tremendous – that said, I would no longer have the excuse that I can’t hear my wife when my after work detour via the sports bar has delayed my return home!