Irwin Lazar: The fourth trend that we’re highlighting is video. The areas that we see the most focus on video right now are giving people at their desks the ability to participate in room-based meetings. So I don’t have to go to an office and find a video conferencing center, I can sit in an airport, in a hotel room, in my home office and participate in a video call with people who are in those conference rooms. That’s the killer app right now for video.
One of my favorite examples is the VA who implemented a video conference capability for soldiers returning from Iraq so they get a free counseling session with a social worker to determine if they’ve got any PTSD related issues. The way they had done that is they switched to a pilot where they were allowing the soldiers to download a video client—high quality, high definition video client—on their desktop and they would have a video conference with a counselor. The counselors could take in many more patients throughout the day, they could load balance out to remote areas that were understaffed, and they could get that visual engagement where they could read body language and see what the attitude was of the person they were talking to.
When you think about those kinds of examples, video is extremely attractive. Again, the challenge we’ve see is a lot of the vendors go to market with the idea that, if we just make it cheap enough and easy enough to use, everyone will use it and it will replace phone calls and that’s not really what we’re seeing.
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