The New Sophisticates: Enterprise Year in Review

"The tracking and reporting of viewing activity is becoming a must-have," says Accordent chief technology officer Mike Lorenz. "As a company, our focus in 2008 is not so much on content creation but on how companies can generate the most benefit from the content they are creating."

For Accordent, that first means introducing more enhancements to its primary content management solution, integrating more robust audience tracking, and reporting features into its offering. Later, it will mean going beyond the basic blocking-and-tackling on content management systems to enhance the platforms that streamline the distribution of live rich media in the corporate sector.

In 2008, Accordent tackled one of the sector’s dirty little secrets, that many live webcasts caused network congestion problems because of the way rich media presentations for distribution on a corporate network were packaged.

For online events that combine online video and PowerPoint slides, many vendors ship the video in a stream that can be efficiently shared by multiple computers on a network using a distribution protocol called "multicast." Snafus can emerge, though, in a live event if hundreds or thousands of workers watching an event simultaneously request a piece of static content—such as a presentation slide—from a central server at the same time.

Accordent’s Multicast In-Stream Technology basically allows the slides in a rich media presentation to be shared on a multicast basis in much the same way that video is efficiently passed through corporate networks today.

Other vendors seek to promote efficiency in the workplace by knitting together the best attributes of a range of web communications technologies under a single umbrella.

Plano, Texas-based Espre Solutions, for instance, acquired a startup company in November 2008 called OpenACircle that offers an integrated platform that captures and manages content from collaborative meetings and online video events. By serving as a hub for all the meetings and content produced by a specific product team, the OpenACircle platform aspires to create a repository of meetings, videos, and related content produced by a group during an extended project effort.

Technology vendor IVT in 2008 offered its own take on the unified communications experience, serving up a hosted solution that manages archives of content captured from an array of communications systems, such as web conferences and audio teleconferences, as well as online video webcasts.

The new IVT platform, called PrimeTime, sets the stage for online video to share the stage with other communications venues that have been long-accepted in the corporate sector, says IVT president and chief executive officer Phillip Whalen.

"Executives love the concept of having a single place where they can control and provision a wide array of archived content, including online video," Whalen says.By putting rich media and online video on an even playing field with other technologies, the webcasting market can win more exposure, which helps build additional corporate interest and demand in video-enriched alternatives, Whalen explains. Even though the industry has made progress in evangelizing itself and its growth prospects in 2008, Whalen says the work has only begun in tapping the growth potential that could accompany even more extensive adoption of online video in day-to-day business activities.

"For those executives who know the technology and are forward-looking, they’re past the point of convincing. They’re ready to go," Whalen says. "But the majority of companies in 2008 are just beginning to stick their toes in the water. There are so many newbies using online business video, the prospects for continued growth are huge."