Video conferencing jumps as more start working from home
When the coronavirus pandemic first started in Wuhan, China, the makers of a popular video conferencing service noticed something. Usage of the service, called GoToMeeting, began to spike.
As the virus spread to the West Coast of the U.S., then to Europe and particularly Italy, they saw it again – always with the same pattern of use as workers were told to do their jobs from home, to the point that the company now can predict where similar behavior might next hit.
Texas, it’s your turn.
Paul Gentile, senior director of product market
ing for LogMeIn Inc, the company that develops GoToMeeting, said last week the patterns confirmed that Texas would be hit “pretty hard” as this week unfolded.
Video conferencing was already on the rise well before the current pandemic made “social distancing” a buzz phrase, analysts said.
Microsoft offers its corporate Teams product and the venerable Skype application. Cisco owns WebEx, another video conferencing brand that has been around for a while. Google, the search giant, has Google Hangouts Meet. And other makers of business collaboration products, such as Slack, also now offer video capabilities as part of their packages.
Businesses whose employees can do their work remotely want to use the same tools at home that they do at work, and increasingly that includes video conferencing. It becomes a bigger part of work when they’re told to do their jobs from home.
That usage of video conferencing, which is occurring globally, allowed LogMeIn to see what was happening with the virus early in China.
“We had a 200 percent spike in usage,” Gentile said. “It has since plateaued (in China) to more consistent levels.”
Gentile said LogMeIn has seen it often enough that it now can predict where the next spike might happen. He said the company saw the shutdown coming in Italy before it hit.
The company can use those insights to point its sales efforts in the direction of spikes.
But like many of its competitors, LogMeIn also is providing many of its services to some customers for no charge as the virus becomes more prevalent.
For example, it is offering an “Emergency Remote Work Kit” for nonprofit, municipal, health care and education users for three months free. When the pandemic subsides, some of these customers will hopefully remain.
Video preferred
At BMC Software, employees are not strangers to using video conferencing. It’s the preferred way of communicating among many of its workers.
In any given month, Scott Crowder, BMC’s chief information officer, said the enterprise software developer’s video conferencing system logs between 10 million and 12 million minutes of usage.
“I’ll use to talk to people on the floor above me,” says Crowder, who in a previous life managed the video conferencing business for Sprint, when the technology was fresh and new.
Even with its already massive video usage, Crowder said he’s seeing increases as a result of the work from home imperative as the novel coronavirus has spread across the globe.
He predicted those millions of minutes could go up by 20 percent to 30 percent.
BMC is not alone. With more people whose jobs can be done remotely being told to work from home, video conferencing is accelerating even faster.
And as more people are being told to work from home, that means residential internet providers will see more activity on their networks as usage shifts away from commercial locations and providers.
Aside from saving money by cutting back on travel, much of the day-to-day growth in video conferencing has been generated by younger people entering the workforce, said Tom Eagle, director and senior analyst at Gartner.
“Younger workers are used to using video with their friends and families,” he said. “They expect the same kind of functionality. They are used to it, and they don’t want to be separated from it.”
In terms of cloud-based conferencing, video is the second fastest-growing segment of the market behind cloud-based telephony, he added.
As businesses have moved to using technology that lets users collaborate remotely, video has been bolted onto other applications.
BMC’s Crowder said its system fuses multiple capabilities — including document collaboration, calendars, email and product management — with video. It has become a part of BMC’s corporate culture.
“When you walk into a conference room, you can instantly send an invite and within a minute, have the people you need on the screen in the room,” he said. “If they are sharing content from Skype, that will instantly pop up.”
To ensure that BMC employees can work remotely with any customer or partner, its system can accept almost any video conferencing service.
Load management
With more workers bringing their collaboration and video applications home, business-hours internet traffic is shifting from commercial providers to residential ones.
In some cases, these may be the same providers — both Comcast and AT&T have robust business as well as residential networks and services, for example.
“We have seen a shift in usage patterns toward more daylight hours in those areas like Seattle,” said Joe Shadler, executive director of corporate communications for Comcast. “Overall the peak load is similar to what you’d normally see during prime time,” in the evenings.
Most work-from-home network traffic isn’t heavy lifting — email, word processing documents, spreadsheets and chat are common. Even video conferencing traffic doesn’t put that much of a load on their network, he said.
Analyst Eagle agreed, saying “the requirements for doing simple video conferencing don’t put that much of a strain on modern connections.”
The use of video to communicate was already in the process of changing the American work landscape, he said, adding Gartner expects it would become a dominant part of how people do business in five to 10 years. Now, he said, that may accelerate to the “lower end of that range.”
“This is an unrequested acceleration of the process. No one anticipated it,” Eagle said. “But nevertheless it is here.”