Making the Business Case for Web Conferencing
Author: David Mario Smith
Date: May 29, 2014
Topic: Collaboration
Research Note Number: 2014-13
Issue: What collaboration technologies and architectures should enterprises leverage for competitive advantage?
Summary: Web conferencing has shown tremendous benefits for businesses of all sizes. Planners evaluating solutions should focus justification around cost reduction and fit for specific use cases to reap business benefits.
In the current corporate and global economic climate, IT and business leaders in organizations throughout the world are looking closely at how to reduce the cost of operations while improving business efficiencies. The use and adoption of collaboration tools such as web conferencing have been on the forefront of this trend, as beneficial but also as necessary for cost reduction, team collaboration and knowledge sharing across the organization. This research note will highlight and discuss the cost savings and business benefits of using web conferencing technology.
Adoption of web conferencing services has focused on a myriad of internal and external uses. Well before “SaaS” was a popular term, web conferencing services have long been delivered that way. When IT and lines of business planners for small or large businesses begin investigating web conferencing solutions, they are sometimes lost in navigating the varied vendor landscape. Technical convergence has played a big part as offerings are starting to serve multiple purposes. Leading offerings include VoIP, web and video conferencing as well as chat.
Business planners evaluating web conferencing offerings are also faced with the task of coming up with clear justification for making the investment. With web conferencing being predominantly delivered in the cloud via a SaaS model, we typically see departmental purchases of most solutions. Enterprise-wide purchases where IT gets involved usually occur alongside a unified communication and collaboration infrastructure platform investment or via web, audio and videoconference services from telecom providers that provide their own solutions or resell others.