India leads the way in using video conferencing for new business, says a survey commissioned by Polycom on more than 1,200 business decision makers across the world.
Sixty percent of respondents in India said they use or would use video conferencing for new business. This is followed by Russia and Brazil at 49 and 44 percent, respectively. Across the globe, 38 percent of respondents use video, or would use video, for new business.
Video conferencing removes distance barriers and improves productivity between teams in different cities and countries, says almost all (96 percent) business decision makers participated in a survey commissioned by Polycom.
Video conferencing was ranked the third most preferred methods of communications (47 percent) after e-mail (89 percent) and voice/conference calls (64 percent), the survey said.
Those business leaders and managers expect video to be their most preferred collaboration tool in three years (52 percent), followed by e-mail (51 percent) and voice/conference calls (37 percent).
The “Global View: Business Video Conferencing Usage and Trends” survey of more than 1,200 business decision makers conducted by Redshift Research says video conferencing is an essential tool helping improve team collaboration and closing the physical and cultural gap between colleagues doing business across distances.
Respondents who use video conferencing today said the three biggest advantages are: better collaboration between globally dispersed colleagues (54 percent), greater clarity of topics being discussed (45 percent) and more efficient meetings (44 percent).
Over three quarters of decision-maker respondents (76 percent) are now using video conferencing at work with 56 percent of video users taking part in video calls at least once a week. The trend is more visible in Brazil, India and Singapore, as more than two-thirds of respondents in those countries use video conferencing at least once a week.
The survey also revealed that 83 percent of respondents, and almost 90 percent of those in their 20s and 30s, use consumer video conferencing solutions at home today, and almost half of all respondents use video conferencing at home at least once a week.
The study also showed that laptops and desktops are the most popular devices for business video conferencing (75 percent of respondents), followed by conference rooms (48 percent) and mobile devices (42 percent).
As video conferencing continues to become more pervasive, in three years laptops and desktops are still expected to be the most preferred device (72 percent), while mobile devices and conference room usage will increase to 55 and 51 percent, respectively.
Asia-Pacific sees video as critical tool for global business. In the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region, international communications (between colleagues in different countries) ranked as the most important use of video conferencing (65 percent), versus 57 percent for inter-country communications.
The U.S. leads the way in leveraging video conferencing for recruitment and hiring, as 32 percent of video respondents said they use or would use video for this purpose, followed by APAC at 28 percent.
In the Europe, Middle-East and Africa (EMEA) region, respondents were mostly using video conferencing to empower flexible working environments, which was cited as the second highest reason for using the technology, after “connecting with colleagues across the country.”
