Article Oct 31, 2018 2 min read

Legacy video infrastructure face end-of-life? Here’s what you need to know

Lindsey Baine

Oct 31, 2018 2 min read

Lindsey Baine

A few years ago, companies who wanted high-quality, professional video conferencing had to invest in infrastructure to host their meeting service. It was the wise decision to make at the time. In fact, it was the only decision. The high cost of buying, managing, and supporting this infrastructure? That was simply accepted as a cost of doing business.

Today, however, much of that legacy video conferencing infrastructure is facing end-of-life. Those same companies who smartly invested in hardware a few years ago will soon lose support, and will need to determine the best options for their company.

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In this guide we share how technology leaders can:

Get more ROI from existing video equipment
Decide which considerations should be made for new meeting spaces
Determine which deployments options are best suited to their needs

When choosing a migration strategy, consider the needs of your employees both today and in the future. The way we work is changing. Employees are no longer tied to their desks from 9 to 5, and need collaboration tools that work where they do.

Teams also need a better way to communicate with external organizations who may use different tools. Not everyone has standards-based video conferencing systems today, and there must be a way to use existing systems to communicate with others on Skype for Business and G Suite, and vice versa.

We’ve seen the decline in video conferencing infrastructure trends over the past few years as companies respond to these trends and move toward cloud-based services instead. Here is what a couple of analyst firms have to say about the shift:

“Infrastructure revenue continues to decline as migration to cloud leads to declining CAPEX investments. In addition, there is a downward impact on the market from the shift to converged call control. Growing virtualization and software-based solutions have led to declining prices putting further strain on revenues.” - Frost & Sullivan, Global Video Conferencing Endpoints and Infrastructure Market, 2015

“It is clear that in North America and EMEA the market has largely moved to Opex/SaaS.” - Wainhouse Research, SpotCheck, Q1 2018

Companies are increasingly moving applications to the cloud for scalability, innovation, and the future-proofing of their investments, as well as to capitalize on Opex versus Capex investments. In fact, a recent LogicMonitor study estimates that 83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020.

Video infrastructure is no longer the best answer to most video deployment architectures.

Does that mean purpose-built video systems from the likes of Cisco and Polycom have seen their day? Absolutely not! Your existing investments are not obsolete, and you can get even more ROI from those investments by registering them to a cloud video service.

Secure, high-quality video conferencing no longer requires you to own video infrastructure; cloud services can accomplish this, while protecting your investments and saving money at the same time.