Leveraging video in any business scenario can help to promote any brand or company at a cost-effective price. With many players currently in the field, how do you determine which organization can help you to meet your individual needs? Check out Vidtel (News - Alert), a company that powers innovative video conferencing solutions.

Established in 2008 and touted as a cloud-based service provider, Vidtel recently sat down with TMC’s CEO Rich Tehrani to discuss where the company sees business video headed in 2012, how budgets will be adjusted this year to further promote the use of video within the corporate environment and in what scenarios business video is typically implemented. Mariette Wharton, vice president of marketing at Vidtel, discussed all of the above with Tehrani and also shed light on a session that she spoke at last week at Business Video Expo, which took place in conjunction with ITEXPO (News - Alert) East in Miami, Fla., titled “Videoconferencing Made Easy.”

Wharton boasts over a decade of experience in high-tech marketing, Internet commerce strategy and management consulting. As a management consultant for Fortune 100 companies, she has been at the forefront of multiple market research projects and created go-to-market strategies for financial service institutions such as Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, NationsBank (now Bank of America) and General Motors Acceptance Corp (GMAC). To read the full interview, see below.

How receptive are executives at your organization to expanded use of video in business communications?

We use video conferencing daily to interact with dispersed employees, partners and customers and our customers do, too. It is an invaluable way to reduce travel expenditures as well as stay in close face-to-face contact with important internal and external constituents. We have negotiated contracts over our video conferencing service with companies in the Midwest and on the East Coast without ever having an in-person meeting and we use it for status updates, daily management and just checking in with partners and internal employees.Many businesses are coping with significant hurdles to video conferencing: $100,000+ in infrastructure costs for business-grade multi-party conferencing, B2B interoperability challenges, security fears of leaving video systems outside the corporate firewall, wanting to integrate enterprise and consumer technologies and handling the BYOD and mobility trend where workers are using Skype (News - Alert) and IT departments are struggling to figure out support and security policies. Our cloud video conferencing service addresses and meets all these needs and fears, for about the same price as a phone service for our Connect service (point-to-point calling, device registration, firewall traversal) and starting at $.15/minute or $199/month for our unlimited multi-party cloud service called MeetMe.

How will the budgets allocated for deploying video technology in 2012 compare to 2011?

Through our relationships with video conferencing VARs and service providers, we see an increasing demand for cloud video conferencing service as opposed to more expensive hardware options. As more companies become aware of cost-effective alternatives to video conferencing through cloud solutions, more are allocating budgets for a cloud-based any-to-any video conferencing service, recognizing this is far more cost-effective than an internally-hosted solution (hundreds of thousands of dollars upfront in addition to thousands of dollars a month on-going) or managed service solutions (up to thousands of dollars a month with fewer interop solutions).The total cost of ownership of the Vidtel MeetMe service is approximately 25 percent of the cost of managed service provider and about 5 percent of the cost of an internally-run multi-party system (given steep upfront infrastructure investments and IT support required).Also, we're witnessing downward pressure on the enterprise endpoints (not just the so-called telepresence solutions for $20,000 but the $1,500 and under video systems such as Vu TelePresence), allowing a smaller percentage of IT budget on video devices.  Be on the lookout later this year for less-expensive video devices.How is video used most frequently in your organization? In live video events or in the use of video to develop on-demand content?Usage of live video outstrips video content usage by far. Our company uses live video on a daily basis both for one-to-one ad hoc meetings, scheduled one-to-one meetings as well as ad hoc and scheduled multi-party video conferences with customers, partners and prospective partners and customers.Are you seeking technologies that help your organization to link existing video conferencing room equipment to the corporate network in order to enable distribution of video meetings to the corporate desktop?As the pioneer of any-to-any cloud video conferencing concept and the first to execute an enterprise-to-consumer video conferencing strategy, we stay on the leading edge and are adding new video technologies to our network on an on-going basis.Our company was founded in 2008 to solve the key problems that were preventing companies from taking full advantage of their existing equipment (i.e., lack of interoperability between different vendors’ devices, the difficulty of B2B video conferencing, firewall traversal, high cost of infrastructure and management for enterprise-quality multi-party video conferencing), so enabling the distribution of video meetings to the corporate desktop as well as mobile applications is a top priority.Our Vidtel MeetMe cloud service enables connectivity between a broad range of manufacturers’ devices (e.g., Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize, InFocus, Sony, Vu, Radvision (News - Alert)) as well as proprietary networks (Skype, Google).Does your organization allow employees to use Skype or other live video collaboration tools at the desktop?We frequently use Skype and our cloud video conferencing service with Tandberg, Cisco, LifeSize (News - Alert), Vu, Sony, Polycom, CounterPath and Google technologies.  We see demand from hundreds of our customers to use Skype to connect to conference room and board room video conferencing systems, enabling them to work remotely from tablets, smartphones, PCs/Macs and still participate in business-grade video conferencing.

Will the use of online video in outbound marketing communications increase in the coming year? Does your company use video in marketing applications beyond traditional advertising, such as Webcasting product launch events, distributing executive presentations or providing customer service and product information?

We use videos to demonstrate the use of our cloud video conferencing service and to demonstrate the “how-tos” of dialing into our service. We plan to deploy more video content for partner training.Has your organization used social media applications, such as Facebook and Twitter, to draw more viewership for your organization’s video content?Social media is an important tool for drawing viewership to video content.How has the growing interest in mobile devices, such as tablet computers, impacted your strategy for making business video available in the mobile environment?The explosive trend toward “bringing your own devices” (BYOD) and the dramatic uptick in tablet sales has accelerated our integration of mobile devices into the cloud video conferencing service network we have built.  Customers want to use tablets and smartphones to connect to enterprise video systems; they can do so with our service for a price-disruptive fee.What priority, if any, is your company placing on making it easier for employees to create and upload their own video content?Making is easy to create and upload videos is important to us. We have invested in a video content service to facilitate creating, uploading, and tracking viewership of video content.
Jamie Epstein is a TMCnet Web Editor. Previously she interned at News 12 Long Island as a reporter's assistant. After working as an administrative assistant for a year, she joined TMC as a Web editor for TMCnet. Jamie grew up on the North Shore of Long Island and holds a bachelor's degree in mass communication with a concentration in broadcasting from Five Towns College. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin