As business operations grow increasingly dispersed and the remote workforce gains ground, integrated video can help to create seamless connections, promote greater efficiency, streamline business workflow and drive competitive advantage.
But many organizations are not using integrated video to its full potential, missing opportunities to overcome operational and safety challenges, mitigate risk, ensure compliance, enhance collaboration, boost productivity and more.
What is integrated video?
An integrated video solution offers a seamless interface between video platforms and other systems and tools. By improving safety, efficiency, communication and cost savings, video collaboration innovations are powering everything from manufacturing ecosystems to video conferencing.
Using integrated video to improve business workflow
Integrated video is changing organizational operations by replacing piecemeal solutions with technology that propels efficient, data-driven automation to improve business workflow. Historically, solutions involved a time-consuming effort to play, watch, analyze and share videos with manually cobbled-together systems, processes and data. Now, it can all be accomplished with more streamlined solutions.
For example, Verizon Connect is an integrated video solution for fleets. It captures artificial intelligence (AI)-powered video with dashcam hardware that detects harsh driving events using telemetrics. Driver behavior—such as hard braking or acceleration—triggers a video recording. The fleet manager is then automatically notified of the event and gains access to the video clip as well as all related data through the software.
Integrated video has also become fundamental to the way dispersed teams communicate. Organizations now rely on video collaboration tools. Users gain secure, one-touch access to meetings, interactive streaming events, virtual workspaces and even telehealth appointments—from any device or browser—with unparalleled interoperability.
One Talk by Verizon also allows for easy video integration in the workplace to further improve business workflow. The mobile-first business phone system enhances and simplifies connectivity and video collaboration; users can host video calls right within the platform and invite others by simply sharing a link.
Will integrated video work for your business?
When assessing integrated video solutions, it's critical to evaluate your needs with careful consideration of your existing technology stack, IT infrastructure, necessary hardware and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Integrated video with streaming features may require WAN optimization or an enterprise content delivery network. Gartner® defines WAN optimization tools as products that improve the performance of applications running across the WAN as well as reduce WAN service expenses. WAN optimization solutions continue to evolve, and now support four high-level needs:
- Improving the response times for users of business-critical applications over WAN links or mobile connections
- Assisting in maximizing ROI for WAN bandwidth
- Optimizing data-center-to-data-center (DC-to-DC) traffic for faster storage replication and synchronization
- Assisting in directing traffic across multiple WANS, such as a hybrid WAN or public cloud connectivity.
At the same time, other solutions may only need built-in software for full plug-and-play functionality. The value of integrated video is its ability to work well with your IT infrastructure, so having the capability to extend any video platform to meet your needs with custom APIs is key. These integration-friendly platforms offer developers the ability to customize APIs for seamless integration with a wide variety of software, such as scheduling tools, maps, project management systems, messaging applications, collaboration hubs, HR and finance systems, CRMs and more by sharing information quickly and securely.
Whether embedding videos in workflows, programmatically importing or exporting videos, performing custom analytics or simply connecting one tool to another, this flexibility will determine the power of your solution.
See for yourself how Verizon can help harness the power of AI-backed integrated video and upgrade your business workflow.
The author of this content is a paid contributor for Verizon.
1Gartner, What is wide area network (WAN) optimization software?, as on 18th February 2022. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.