Coming of Age: 2006 Enterprise Year in Review

Multi-Use Multimedia
One of the factors contributing to the proliferation of multimedia content in the enterprise is the variety of ways in which executives are putting the technology to work. Seventy-two percent of companies surveyed that deploy online multimedia incorporate the technology into three or more different communications applications.

This means that companies investing in online multimedia are treating it not as a one-dimensional tool that enables a specific activity, such as employee training or executive presentations. Rather, when companies begin using web audio and video, they treat the technology as a fundamental data type that can be integrated into a broad array of online communications applications.

Current rends are likely to foster even more diversity in the ways that companies deploy online multimedia. Large companies have long been the primary purchasers of enterprise multimedia technologies and have used the capabilities mostly to enhance the way they communicate with employees in far-flung offices.

Now, companies that could be considered more "mid-sized"—with workforces of between 1,000 and 5,000 employees—are getting into the mix and demonstrating significant interest in using multimedia for applications beyond basic employee communications.

The highest portion of companies reporting plans to boost spending on rich-media technologies in 2006 comes from companies with between 1,000 and 2,499 employees. Among this group, 55% reported plans to boost rich-media spending in 2006 compared with the 40% of companies with more than 5,000 employees that had anticipated boosts in spending levels for 2006.

The implications of this emerging spending pattern are significant. As spending levels for the technology grow fastest among mid-sized companies, the ways that companies use the technologies—and the rationales they use to justify their deployment—are likely to evolve significantly.

Most importantly, smaller companies have different communications priorities that must be addressed with online multimedia capabilities. By their nature, smaller organizations do not face the same communications challenges as do giant global corporations. Rather, their primary challenge lies in finding cost-effective ways to communicate effectively with targeted groups of prospective customers.

As a result, increases in spending among the "middle class" of corporate America are beginning to spawn expanded interest in uses of the technology with which companies create content and marketing presentations designed for audiences beyond their corporate network’s firewalls.

The growing interest in marketing-oriented deployments is another trend being fueled by the YouTube phenomenon, say vendors of enterprise multimedia tools and services. Awareness of the potential of online multimedia created by the rise of personal multimedia publishing on the web has driven executives at companies of all sizes to begin thinking more seriously about the ways that the technology can be used in outbound marketing.

Such thinking translates into new opportunities for companies such as VeriSign, where marketing executive Todd Johnson perceives expanded opportunities for selling the company’s Kontiki enterprise-class peer-to-peer distribution system to organizations that are expanding the use of multimedia for both internal and external communications.