Operator Attended Web Conferencing to Bring Remote CXOs Closer

A high profile corporate event is not held within the confines of a boardroom. It has shifted to the Virtual Conferencing environment with the advent of operator attended web conferencing solutions. Such solutions have proven to be extremely successful in hosting corporate announcements, board meetings, Investor Relations meetings, analysts meetings and quarterly or annual Earnings Calls. These high profile events are usually organised by CXOs or Executives managing the local branches of the company. In a country like Singapore, which is home to many MNCs APAC Regional head offices such prescheduled web based meetings can prove to be highly beneficial.

The distinctive feature of an operator attended web conferencing event is the full dedication of an Event Manager. The operator is responsible for various pre-call, actual conference and post-call activities, such as sending invitations and reminders, making announcements during the event and generating post-conference reports. Such prescheduled events have higher success rate than reservationless conferencing solutions due to the value-added services rendered by the operator.

Remote collaboration has became more dynamic with the launch of unified communications solutions. For example, browser based solutions like Arkadin Oneplace and Cisco WebEx have several features that facilitate seamless file transfer between the group members. Other tools include hosting presentations, sharing desktop screens and deploying desktop video conferencing with group members simultaneously. Such hosted conferencing solutions are available on the Software-as-a-Service or SaaS model. Clients are billed on pay-per-use basis, which proves to be cost effective in the long run.

Since mobility is a major factor in remote meetings, it is essential to use a solution that delivers an excellent conferencing and collaboration experience even through mobile devices, such as Smartphones and tablet computers. With companies coming up with dedicated apps for such devices, the participants attending the virtual event via a mobile device with high speed Internet connection can enjoy the same unmatched experience that a desktop-based solution offers.

According to Frost & Sullivan, interoperability within the conferencing suite is an essential feature for most companies. Thus, many solutions have opened APIs and SDKs, so that they can be integrated with a host of business applications and can be fused within a telepresence ecosystem. Moreover, users will be able to access New Media tools, including wikis, blogs, profiles and communities and streaming, for better collaboration. These have been said to be critical for the long term usability of any web conferencing suite in the corporate environment.

Hosting a high level virtual conference provides significant cost benefits to all users. Companies that started adopting such solutions as early as 2008 used to save as much as 4/5th of the expenses they would have spent in hosting the same meeting at a convention hall. This figure has only increased in the past few years, as the deployment rate has grown and costs have come down.