Concluding 2018 with an announced merger with fellow video conferencing provider Videxio, Pexip and video conferencing are hot property at the moment. Following the success of 2018, I spoke to Jordan Owens, VP of Architecture at Pexip to get his thoughts and predictions for the landscape of the video conferencing and collaboration industry in 2019.
The rise of interactive collaboration tools
Jordan commented on the key collaboration industry players beefing up their capabilities in the last few years - Google, Microsoft, Workplace for Facebook and Slack. "It’s become clear that organisations will no longer settle for one trick pony solutions. In 2019, modern meeting architectures - where both synchronous and asynchronous communication occurs within the same interface and workflow - will grow in importance. Furthermore, solutions will start to offer more embedded interactive features like simplified recording and transcription services to support better access, as well as shared whiteboard collaboration canvases and document sharing and collaboration tools".
Data privacy to be a top concern - even in video
With the introduction of GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, data privacy was a common theme in 2018. Jordan said "this has had a trickle-down effect and data privacy will be a top concern in video conferencing in 2019. Companies will especially be stringent in cloud providers collecting metadata such as meeting topics, participants and content shared, or what they consider to be private information. Compliance will take a spotlight as more companies will face fines for not meeting standards".
Customer deployment
I asked Jordan if he thought customers genuinely think they can trust and deploy this technology without hiring someone new?
“Absolutely! Modern meeting architectures - whatever they may be - have been designed around simplicity across the board, including management. Granted, administrators will need some form of re-training on new systems and the syntax for those systems. But the reality is that the majority of these systems are quite simple to use and manage. In short, this is absolutely possible.”
Security delays
Having experienced delays myself as a customer, consultant and project manager, security is often the major delay when deploying new technologies in enterprises. Jordan said:
