In a recent study conducted by Cisco WebEx by Wakefield Research, small business owners will spend up to four weeks working remotely. They will do by using online tools and web collaboration to stay in touch and get the job done. The survey was conducted between June 6 and June 14, involving the owners of businesses with 100 or fewer employees.

Summer may be the time for vacations, but small business owners can’t afford to be away from the office for long. To make the most of work and personal time, many plan to work remotely, on average, 18 days this summer, according to the survey of 500 U.S. small business owners.

One way to get it done is with a free basic account from WebEx.

15% say they intend to work remotely 36 days or more. Read More »

Tags: Basic, business, remote, remote worker, research, small business, study, telecommute, WebEX

These days, many people take it for granted that they can stay informed, connected, and entertained anytime and anywhere.

But as with any change, these new capabilities and new expectations bring new challenges.  With more devices, ubiquitous internet access, and content digitized at their finger tips, consumers now face new struggles-- from managing content libraries fragmented across devices to worrying that they’re paying again and again for the same song or movie in order to access it when and where they want.

As Connected Life continues to evolve, the advancing front is being driven by the cloud.  The cloud provides answers to the new challenges consumers face living their Connected Lives. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, cloud, Connected, enhancements, IBSG, life, market, providers, service, Service Provider, services, study, Watch

Enterprise video is experiencing tremendous change in terms of adoption, traffic growth, business model evolution, and technology innovation.

We recently undertook an extensive study to uncover key insights about the use of business video in U.S. enterprises. The survey is part of the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group’s Horizons program, which combines multimodal research and analysis to identify business transformation opportunities fueled by technology innovation.

Since the purpose of this study was to understand how the use of video is evolving in the enterprise, we chose to seek insight from executives at enterprises with at least 1,000 employees, from across the United States.  For this study, we recruited more than 450 enterprises from more than 20 industries across the United States, including both Cisco customers and non-Cisco customers.

Because we wanted to understand both end-user and IT perspectives on business video, participants included both business executives (i.e., from non-IT functions such as sales, marketing, finance, and engineering), and IT executives.

Our research uncovered several key findings:

#1: Business Video is already widespread throughout the enterprise.

• We discovered that business video is already well entrenched in the enterprise. More than three out of four business executives said they use either one-way video or two-way video—or both—at least once a week.
• This trend is growing: more than 70 percent of respondents said they will increase their use of business video in the next two years.

#2: A majority of executives are active in both recording videos and viewing employee-created videos, and they plan to do more of both.

• More than 70 percent of corporate executives expect their use of one-way and two-way video to grow over the next two years. Currently, 34 percent of business executives record business videos on a daily basis, and 62 percent of business executives watch employee-created videos at least once a week. Read More »

Tags: business video, Cisco IBSG, collaboration, enterprise video, Horizons, mobile computing, mobility, network, research, study, survey, video