BYOD and The Cloud: A Perfect Marriage

Darren Podrabsky
Vice President of Marketing & Channels





BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), or the practice of employees bringing their own devices to work and connecting them to their company network, is clearly trending in the Unified Communications industry today. A recent study* sponsored by Cisco including 600 U.S. IT and business leaders indicates that the average knowledge worker has around 3 devices connected to their company network, and the average is expected to grow to 3.3 by 2014. You can imagine what they are: iPhones, iPads, laptops, Android devices, videoconferencing systems, etc.  How many devices do you have connected at work?

It’s a good bet that every one of these devices are or will be video-enabled. If you’re following the trends in the telepresence and videoconferencing market today, you know that video at the desktop and mobile video continues to be hot, while immersive telepresence is not - at least not so far in 2012. It’s all about video on whatever you have wherever you are. I’ll come back to why this is important.

But first, why does BYOD continue to be news? And what does it mean to the average videoconferencing user?

Well first, BYOD is a direct shot at IT managers trying to setup and manage ‘company standard’ environments for their ever sprawling Unified Communications portfolio. If you are an IT manager, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Even a simple minded marketing guy like me understands that the trick to supporting a UC environment at scale is setting up a ‘company standard’ environment, training your staff or bringing in the necessary expertise, and carefully managing costs. You want to avoid investments in multiple infrastructure platforms and interoperability challenges, while scaling to meet demand. Simply put, BYOD flies right in the face of this strategy.

Well, interestingly enough, the Cisco study goes on to say:

• 84% of the respondents (IT and business leaders) allow employee-owned devices, AND provide some level of support.
• 36% provide full support for employee-owned devices. That’s right - full support!!

So, IT managers are beginning to embrace BYOD. How could this happen? Well, my take is that they are accepting that employees want to use what they want to use to be productive, and they are turning to the cloud to offer support. Here is why:

Call Registration & Support: As an esteemed colleague of mine pointed out the other day - in a cloud videoconference across the country by the way - someone has to give all of these video-enabled devices a ‘dial tone’, much like the first free VOIP services back in the day. And, think about the sheer number of choices that employees have today to video-enable their devices: Polycom® RealPresence® Mobile, Cisco Jabber, Microsoft® Lync™, Skype™, Google Talk, etc. Cloud services providers like Glowpoint invest in multiple infrastructure and video signaling platforms precisely so they can provide services for the widest range of videoconferencing systems. Multi-tenancy and supporting call volumes at scale is exactly the point of using the cloud. It can be scaled up or down. Which leads to my next point…

Call Capacity: This is already a topic of discussion in the videoconferencing industry: Do I buy yet another bridge that I have to stand up and support, or buy ports in the cloud? BYOD will force the discussion, as video usage grows in all the wrong places from an IT manager’s perspective. It will drive the average number of participants in video calls higher, creating the need for more flexible, pay-as-you-use cloud videoconferencing services like video bridging.

Interoperability: Again, when you think about the sheer number of choices, let alone the challenges that still remain between supporting H.323, SIP and TIP environments, the message is clear. BYOD will drive demand for easy, on-demand cloud videoconferencing services that support almost any device.

Now, IT managers: Please stop reading for a few moments. I need to tell your users something…

BYOD users can and probably will ‘sneak’ into the cloud and sign up for call support for their favorite video-enabled device - it’s very easy and cheap. This actually ends up being a benefit to IT managers, provided that concerns with security are addressed.

So, BYOD and the cloud seems like the perfect marriage to me. It lets employees use their device of choice to be more productive, without causing IT managers undue headaches. BYOD away!

Footnotes:

* Cisco Study on BYOD: http://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=854754