IDC MarketScape on Video Cloud Services Reveals How Providers Position Video Cloud Portfolios to Meet Cross-Border Collaboration Demands of European Multinationals

LONDON, January 14, 2016 — International Data Corporation (IDC) has released its 2015 MarketScape study profiling and ranking the leading providers in the video cloud services market. The IDC MarketScape methodology placed BT and Orange Business Services in the "Leaders" category, followed — in some cases, very closely — by 11 "Major Players" and "Contenders."

Large enterprises/multinationals have been among the early adopters of video but mainly to conduct immersive video sessions for globally dispersed boardroom members. Often these video deployments were owned by the company and managed in-house. Now, we are seeing these big businesses increasingly deploying video for all employees, on all types of endpoints and devices, both fixed and wireless. In parallel, their demand for video cloud services is growing as the benefits of cloud, such as scalability and flexibility, clearly apply to a high-bandwidth-consuming technology like video.

For video service providers addressing the multinationals, it is important to provide suitable cloud deployments that meet the specific requirements of these big businesses with many dispersed locations around the globe. They must also be able to securely integrate cloud-enabled video services with other/existing networks, voice services, and preferably as part of a unified communication (UC) platform to deploy communications in the most efficient and effective way. This is why IDC evaluated service provider capacity and strategy against a wide set of criteria, such as cloud deployment options (public, private, hybrid), global reach in terms of network capacity, video infrastructure and managed/support services, the level of local expertise to service the dispersed locations of customers, and go-to-market models including support for partners.

"Customers selecting a video cloud service are facing significant challenges," said Melissa Fremeijer, senior research analyst, Enterprise Communications and Collaboration, IDC. "They will need to identify the right video cloud solutions, the type of cloud infrastructure, video collaboration features, tools, services, and unified communications integration levels for their organizations, and more importantly which sources they should turn to for deployment and expertise."

This IDC MarketScape can provide insight to multinational corporations in Europe that are considering new cloud video services to replace their legacy video infrastructure or those that are new to video and are evaluating which video cloud services to adopt to enrich their business communications going forward.

The study, IDC MarketScape: Western Europe Video Cloud Services for MNCs 2015–2016 Vendor Assessment (#EMEA40766115, December 2015), assesses the capabilities and business strategies of 13 providers in the video cloud services market for 2015–2016. These providers, in alphabetical order, are Arkadin, AT&T, Blue Jeans Network, BT, Dimension Data, Orange Business Services, StarLeaf, Talk & Vision, Tata Communications, Telefónica, T-Systems, Verizon, and VisionsConnected. The providers were evaluated using detailed criteria that IDC identified as key factors contributing to service provider success in the Western European video cloud services market for multinationals.