Cloud Video Conferencing and why we chose Zoom

Video conferencing on the whole is becoming more common, and in recent times cloud-based video services is exploding in interest, largely due to the fact it offering more efficient services, more features, and more importantly a lower total cost of ownership. Here we take a look at Cloud-Based video conferencing and why we chose to use Zoom.

Businesses want to use video for B2B, B2C and internal communications and traditionally this has been made difficult or impossible by the need to cross corporate firewalls and lack of interoperability between multiple legacy systems. Cloud-Based conferencing services also support a ‘click to call’ interface that makes it easy to connect calls, increasing user-adoption. Mobile and desktop connectivity is also in high demand with the increase in remote workers in the market place, this has been tricky for many IT managers with legacy systems but this is one of the main focuses from cloud-based conferencing services.

Cloud-based video conferencing offers customers a reduced financial risk as the initial capital is much lower. Customers no longer have to invest heavily in on-prem video and network infrastructure/hardware. Instead they only have to pay a small fee for lower-cost video hardware and make use of the cloud-based network infrastructure and bridging on a monthly or yearly subscription service. Not only does cloud-based video conferencing offer a more affordable solution to businesses, its also very scalable, so you can start with one or two rooms and easily scale up to 100’s of sites and users relatively easily.

Video Conferencing Background

Historically video conferencing has been quite unintuitive and difficult to use, which has resulted in low adoption rates and in turn a low return on investment. With the new cloud-based conferencing services it’s made easy ‘click to call’ and ‘click to meet’ type interfaces which people are familiar with using now most people have a smart phone. There are also many integrations offered with these services that sit within applications the users are already using in there daily work schedule, but we will look into this a bit more later.

However when we started using Zoom, there was no turning back. It offered almost identical features to any of the others, along with many additional features, at a very affordable price. We have had a number of ‘hiccups’ using the various other brands, such as low quality mobile video, problems sharing content on devices, windows compatibility issues etc, and the price point on some of these services is not within everyone’s budget.

Here is a small overview of some of the alternatives and feature comparisons for some of these solutions:

What is Cloud-Based Video Conferencing Anyway?

Traditionally if you wanted to have video conferencing in your company, in a large organization at least, you would have to do something along these lines; Buy expensive hardware, buy servers, install and configure software and licensing, procure hosting and bandwidth, deploy servers in data centers, implement call control and registration services, set up network to ensure quality, configure services to allow interoperability and establish processes to maintain the video services. Oh, and employ a team of staff manage, implement and maintain this infrastructure. Sounds a little complicated doesn’t it? It is!

Cloud based conferencing solutions allow businesses to avoid all of this, all you need is a good Internet connection, some inexpensive hardware and to sign up to a monthly or yearly cloud-video-service. It’s that simple! Not only this but if you already have VC infrastructure, you can generally keep it and use this in conjunction with the new cloud service, so your current investments stay functional.

90% of IT decision makers found that the IT department improved after adopting cloud computing. 80 % of companies saw improvements within the first 6 months of adoption, and 82% of companies reportedly saved money by moving to the cloud. There is also a forecasted rate of 45% over the next 5 years for video conferencing as-a-service.

Zoom Video Conferencing

Zoom is predominantly a cloud-based collaboration service, although it does offer on premises services, supporting high quality point-to-point and multipoint video conferencing (up to 1080p), content sharing, group and individual chat as well as a newly launched audio conferencing service. Zoom is sold on a per-named-user basis (which they call a meeting host) and has a VMR (Virtual meeting room) in which those users dial into (up to 200 participants).

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