The cloud has brought video conferencing out of boardrooms and has put it practically anywhere and on all kinds of communication devices such as laptops, smartphones or tablets, opening wide the door to teleworking and mobility.
If at some point videoconferencing ceased to be an exclusive privilege of large corporations, when the trend of occupying proprietary technology full of huge hulks, expensive screens and specialists to operate, manage and maintain it was abandoned, the cloud has made it go out of business. meeting rooms and has put it practically anywhere and on all kinds of communication devices, such as laptops, smartphones or tablets, opening wide the door to teleworking and mobility.
If someone wants to call it a revolution, it doesn’t sound crazy. No more costly video communications for now, thanks to new low-cost cloud video solutions that offer enormous benefits for businesses. In fact, the migration to cloud-based software and services cuts IT costs by 25%, and in the case of video conferencing it is no different.
According to a study by the consultancy IDC, sales of videoconferencing and telepresence equipment are falling in favor of an increase in cloud- based options . Why? For a simple but powerful reason: they are cheaper and easier to adopt than traditional solutions. Thus, it is not surprising that the growth prospects of the sector are placed by the consulting firm Gartner with the sum of more than 200 million users 1 .
However, cloud-based video conferencing is catching more and more fans and is fast becoming the norm. A report from Global Industry Analyzes (GIA) predicts that, on its own, this market will grow 39.6% percent for 2019 and reach more than $ 2 billion in 2020.
Discarded the high initial investment in hardware and the sumptuous expenses associated with the maintenance in those solutions, the cloud now releases its rain on medium and small businesses.
Although the financial sector is an avid consumer of these solutions, the retail market may not yet have discovered all the benefits that can be gained by incorporating video conferencing from the cloud, as one of its main tools to interact with other departments, units business partners, external partners and suppliers, optimize training processes, share experiences, collaborate, hold more frequent meetings, without incurring costs and travel time for personnel transfers 2 .
Undoubtedly, videoconferencing has evolved a lot in recent years and can become an essential and strategic communication tool for companies focused on retail . Collaboration between work teams, stores and corporate areas that are far from each other is a pending challenge for this commercial segment. In this sense, videoconferencing promises to improve your communication, eliminate geographic limitations and waste of time and money in travel.
In this regard, the company See you ON points out that the retail market could benefit (as well as other sectors) in several aspects: employees communicate easily and economically remotely, accelerate their business processes, reduce operating costs, develop new competitive advantages, stimulate the growth of your organization, using our videoconferencing services in the cloud 3 .
In addition, it allows reducing travel times and training costs, thus enabling financial resources to be allocated to the business. Within this scheme there is no asset obsolescence.
Thanks to the deployment of broadband, mobile technologies and, one of the biggest drivers, cloud technology, the videoconferencing market will exceed $ 7.5 billion by 2022, according to a study by the consultancy Credence Research. Thus, currently, the cloud is positioned as one of the key factors for the expansion of videoconferencing, facilitating its implementation and use in companies, with only a minimal initial investment.
