PGi’s legacy in virtual meetings began a long time ago, in audio conferencing – and audio remains a hugely important enabler and differentiator for online communications solutions, whether in large-scale webcasts or for close teamwork.
Audio was the precursor of today’s UC tools and paved the way for the collaboration environments we now enjoy. But even with the enhancement of moving pictures, however, there remains a trade-off between the number of participants on the call and the degree of real interactivity that can take place between them. At the extremes might be a conversation between two individuals, vs a TV broadcast to millions of people – but between them along the spectrum lie a range of different possibilities.
The limits of collaboration
“Your software might enable 125 participants in a meeting”, explained Terry Lyons SVP, Collaboration at PGi, “but in my opinion, once you go beyond 50, it’s really not as collaborative as it could be any more”
To really connect and get things done together with everyone able to contribute effectively, much lower numbers are needed, but the explosion of uptake of video conferencing platforms during 2020 has made their use a lot more spontaneous and flexible, even at scale, and this functionality is now regarded as table stakes for any collaboration solution.
“10 years ago the carriers and service providers were under threat from over the top providers, and now they’re under pressure to provide strong business communications solutions – audio, collaboration and event solutions, that they can bundle together and package into business communication suites,” Lyons explained, in a recent webcast.
Scaling up to interactive events
But the big shift in expectation now is at the scale end, where increasingly enterprises are seeking to communicate to much bigger audiences, either internally or externally/publicly, via webcasts or virtual events.
Here, professionalism is paramount. “These meetings are much less fault-tolerant than audio or collaboration meetings,” explained Lyons, where anything from investor relations or the CEO’s personal reputation could be at stake.
Over the past 6 months, as face-to-face conferences and town halls disappeared off our schedules, PGi have seen an explosion of demand for video in these big events – which has to be delivered at a professional broadcast standard. Furthermore, to encourage engagement and active participation in these events – particularly with so many of them competing for our screens – they need to offer new ways to interact and give feedback in real-time, even if you couldn’t describe it as any kind of peer-to-peer collaboration.
So in terms of positioning services to the market, you can no longer draw a clear distinction between webcast-for-enterprise vs collaboration-for-teams-and-SMEs, in the way one could in the past – although for PGi it makes sense to split the business out between collaboration and events as two broad categories:
The virtual future
Themes and trends Lyons is keeping an eye on for 2021 include the importance of audio, in which PGi continue to invest heavily to underpin quality. He also foresees increasing demand for interactivity in large-scale events, from reactions and emojis to the ability for an audience member to jump in on the call. He continued:
“It’s great to be able to bring someone in who wants to ask a question, rather than me answering against the chat – to be able to talk to you and understand the context of the question, discuss the answer together”
Other changes may be less visible, creating stability and reliable cloud-based performance-driven services levels, letting users scale up and down fast in response to demand, driving down bandwidth utilisation, and adding new security and functionality… But whatever the scale, these are the factors which make our business communications work now, wherever and however we are connecting and getting things done together, and they’re definitely going to be essential, in the new normality of hybrid and distributed working.
