As video has become pervasive throughout organizations — supporting everything from training, sales enablement, and customer service to corporate communications, marketing, and executive messaging — a veritable “who’s who” of experts have begun calling for smarter video management.

Forrester Research leads, commanding readers to “Plan for video content, not just video conferencing.”

Forrester analyst Philipp Karcher notes that, “A growing number of content and collaboration professionals are interested in using webcasting and YouTube-like video portals internally for corporate communications and training”, seeking to:

• Save on the cost of large virtual meetings
• Drive remote employee engagement
• Improve communications from leadership
• Improve training effectiveness, and
• Encourage employees to share best practices

Gartner Research has likewise discussed the need for enhanced video management, especially with regard to training and communications materials that may often be repeated many times.

In their report, “Why You Need Video Content Management in Your Web Conferencing Solution,” analysts David Mario Smith and Whit Andrews contend, “There are cost and time savings to be made in reusing content, compared to running the same live conferencing session multiple times.”

But it’s not just the analysts expounding for video management — forward-looking businesses large and small have seen the value as well.

An early proponent of video platforms as a means to communicate expertise, Microsoft built its own company-wide video portal called “Microsoft Academy” in order to facilitate peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, improve learning, enable virtual conferences, and reduce costs.

In just 3 years Microsoft was able to attribute a 569% ROI and annual cost avoidance of $13.9 million to its Academy video portal.

Today the company uses its video platform to support a host of objectives, including:

• To increase the speed and convenience of knowledge sharing, especially across disparate teams, thereby boosting the company’s competitive advantage;
• To promote knowledge sharing by subject matter experts (where they also noted, “Almost everyone in your organization is a SME in one form or another”);
• To provide employees with a central repository for video content that can be viewed on demand;
• To encourage a less hierarchical, more open company culture; and finally,
• To encourage employee engagement by meeting three key needs people have, namely: sharing, learning and connecting.

A leading financial markets tech firm first experimented with video after finding its project managers had become overwhelmed by demand for demonstrations. Video conferencing had improved the team’s ability to demonstrate the company’s complex products, but the sheer volume of requests for repeated and one-off demos soon began to overwhelm the subject matter experts.

A video platform proved to be the solution, enabling the company to record demonstrations, add presentation slides, and quickly create useful videos that could be shared and replayed over and over — ensuring partners and customers still get the insight they needed while freeing up subject matter experts to focus on new work.

Today the team uses video across the organization to:

• Record product demonstrations for internal audiences
• Develop online training
• Onboard new hires
• Record monthly and quarterly reports from the Chief Officers
• Record WebEx meetings, and
• Integrate its global workforce

As video continues to grow in importance across every department at most organizations, now is the time to heed Forrester’s advice to “plan for video content, not just video conferencing.”

Enterprise video is more than video conferencing. Enhancing existing video conferencing technology with a modern video platform makes using video everywhere in your organization not only possible, but extremely cost-effective.

With established uses cases including employee training aides, customer-facing how-tos, special event recordings, live demonstrations, and more, how your business can make use of video is nearly limitless — both in variety and value.

Find out more, including five ways a video platform can help maximize your investment in video and practical recommendations for enterprise video from the industry leaders like Gartner, Forrester, Siemens, Microsoft, and more in our latest white paper.

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