Come One, Come All to the Meeting Room of the Future

Faster than imaginable, enterprise use of cloud-delivered video meeting services has gone from next to nil to nonstop—evidenced in the market’s 96% year-over-year growth, as Prachi Nema, a principal analyst for enterprise communications with IT research firm Omdia, shared during the latest episode of the firm’s Digital Workplace Sessions video series.

 

We have the mass exodus from the office to working from home to thank for this accelerated adoption, of course. That’s to say, deciding on a video meeting service had largely been tactical in nature. Now it’s time to think more strategically, Nema said.

 

Workplace strategists now must think strategically about the collaborative meeting services in use within their enterprises from the perspective of this prolonged period of working from home and — ultimately, it seems — a mixed workweek of time spent in-office and at home. Now’s the time for businesses to recognize that they must make strategic decisions about what to adopt for the long term, keeping in mind workforce productivity and employee wellbeing, Nema said.

 

And, as Nema’s colleague, Adam Holtby, pointed out, whatever the solution might be, it must allow employees to make the office-to-home-and-back-again transition as smoothly as possible. That’s going to take enabling a real balance between the video meeting services everybody has grown so comfortable using during this period of working from home and the often-formidable video equipment scattered throughout conference rooms back in the office, Nema said.

 

What does that mean? As Nema further explained during the Digital Workplace Sessions video chat, employees must be able to use whatever collaborative meeting service they’re most comfortable with from whatever video gear sits in a conference room. And this shouldn’t be a kludge but rather an optimized solution — i.e., no problem to use Zoom’s service on a Microsoft Teams Room video system, for example.

 

Nema calls this sort of conference room a multiservice room with multipurpose devices. Click on the player below for more details.