That title may be too limiting. The reality is that embedding video meetings into apps and websites enables every type of organization to reimagine how they engage with their customers, students, patients, or constituents. The key is finding an embeddable video meetings service with the necessary features, that is also secure, reliable, and quick and easy to embed into those apps and websites. We did some research to better understand what IT decision makers and video meeting users are looking for. Here are key findings from that research.

The Nexus of Collaboration and Communication

We asked IT leaders and video meeting users to define collaboration. Interestingly, people are now starting to consider collaboration as a form of communication.

From your experience, how would you define collaboration in the workplace?1

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Which of the following activities represent collaboration versus communication? (Green indicates a statistically significant difference)

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n=431

Significantly more professionals who work from home (58%) consider delivering a presentation via application to be communication than those who work in an office setting (34%).

This evolution in how people are characterizing capabilities like screen sharing and video chatting is critical to determining how embeddable video meetings should be used to define new ways of engaging with your customers, patients, students, or constituents.

When using video meetings, people are primarily sharing ideas or information.

What type of information are you sharing via ____? (Green indicates a statistically significant difference)

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To make sharing ideas and information easy, here are the features and capabilities IT decision makers and video meeting users are looking for:

Which of the following best describes your sentiment towards the following features in a business communication platform? (Green indicates a statistically significant difference)

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And here’s how they are ranked in terms of most important:

Which of the following features do you consider to be the most important for a business communication platform? Please rank the top five features.

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As you consider options for embedding video meetings capabilities, evaluate the options based on the solution as a communication tool that enables the sharing of ideas and information. This approach will ensure you consider how a teacher needs to connect with students to share ideas and information via online learning, how a care provider can engage remotely with patients for initial or follow-up consultations or how a business can engage with customers to share new product ideas, provide technical support or enable new sales channels.

The highest levels of security are expected.

Enough has been written about the security issues with various meetings solution providers. As you evaluate embeddable video meetings products, look for end-to-end encryption that is explained with clear, precise language describing how it’s actually implemented. Here’s an example providing an easy to understand explanation of video meeting security.

The importance of reliability

Think about your experiences when it comes to email or surfing the web. If there is a one second delay in the email getting to you or the page changing after clicking the link, it’s often not noticeable. A one second delay in audio or video makes the experience unusable. Service reliability is critical when selecting an embeddable video meetings product. The research validated this point.

What challenges do you face when using ___? (Green indicates a statistically significant difference)

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With more distributed teams and working from home, IT departments have an increasing challenge with delivering a consistent experience over inconsistent networks. An embeddable video meetings service built on a proven network is critical to ensuring an acceptable user experience.

Quick and easy to deploy.

With all of the available technology, developers should be able to focus on creating differentiated capabilities and experiences. Having to recreate meetings capabilities that have already been developed many times over is a waste of their precious time. For embeddable video meetings, quick and easy means the experience is ready to go out of the box - configure, not code.

Bringing it all together.

The new 8x8 Jitsi as a Service embeddable video meetings solution builds on experience from the Jitsi open source community and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to provide a full featured, secure, reliable service that is quick and easy to deploy. Seeing is believing so here are Video Product Lead for 8x8, Jitsi Founder, Matt Gardner, Head of Developer Relations for 8x8 demonstrating just how quick and easy it is to add 8x8 Jitsi as a Service to your apps or websites.

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If video meetings are so impactful, why hasn’t it been important until now?

Great question. To summarize Emil from his recent interview with Mark Smith, CEO and Chief Research Officer of Ventana Research:

  • There was a change in the past couple of years, from looking to solve user to user communication, particularly remote communication, which has been say 10% of users meeting over video as most interactions were meeting face to face to everyone needing to meet remotely, almost overnight. Everyone went through the same motion of, "Okay, well, I guess now I'm just replacing the 90% with video communication using the video app." And we saw that with schools. Schools for example were just, "We have a class and it's with 25 people and we were all in person in the physical world, so now we just need to replace the physical world with a dedicated video app." That's what everyone did. And in all fairness,what else were you going to do? You have to figure out something for next Monday, right?
  • After that quick reaction, it also became obvious it wasn’t working well. A much better way to solve the problem is to reduce the amount of time that you actually need to spend in communication.
  • That's where embedding can really help you. So now once that you figured as an app developer, that your users are going to spend massive amounts of time on video meetings and those meetings are not perfect, what can you do to reduce that time?
    • You can make sure that the meeting is available in a very well-defined context.
    • Meetings need to provide back to applications as much information of what happened into the meeting as is possible.

You can hear Emil’s complete explanation and additional insights on the video imperative in this brief interview with Mark Smith.

Is video meetings a fad that will fade away when things go back to normal?

Definitely not. Although that may seem like a self-serving response given where I work, here’s another summary of Emil’s insights from his interview with Mark Smith:

  • Historically, what does it take for people to actually get to their working place and start working? They commute. Industrialization has driven urbanization as people have been flocking to these work centers and those work centers.
  • We are now at a place where employers are impacted because people are less available to them and less well rested and less prepared to do work.
  • And most of all it impacts people's lives because they spend their life in the car, or in the bus, or in the subway.
  • London, for example, has regulation that every job has to come with a remote working opportunity from now on because the transport network is stretched beyond the sustainable.
  • There's been a lot of discussion lately about the cost of talent in these specific development centers.
  • Now that people are enabled to work remotely, a barrier has fallen and employers are becoming more comfortable with just getting the talent where it is and having the confidence that they can figure out the communication piece.

Hear the complete interview and Emil’s insights here.

Predict the future by inventing it

Although it may be apocryphal, the story of Steve Jobs telling Wendell Weeks, CEO of Corning Glass, “Don’t be afraid. You can do this.” seems to be the right sentiment for the current environment. Those companies that boldly step forward and build the future will lead the way for the new normal and achieve outsized success. A secure, reliable embeddable video meetings service is just one example of how 8x8 can enable you to build your experience.

Start testing it out now with a free developer account.

To learn more about how you can use 8x8 Jitsi as a Service, join Emil Ivov, Matt Gardner and Rex Wang, Oracle's VP of Developer Marketing on Thursday, January 21, 2021 at 11AM Pacific Time as they demonstrate how easy it is to embed video meetings into your apps and website using 8x8 Jitsi as a Service, and how reliable it is thanks to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Register for APIs and IPAs session.

Build the way forward with 8x8 Jitsi as a Service.

1. Hanover Research Collaboration Survey Analysis May 2019 conducted with 224 IT decision makers and 207 end professionals in organizations with 100+ employees headquartered in U.S., U.K., Canada