If you haven’t noticed, cloud-based video-sharing is one the major trends in the past decade. When coupled with video-producing smartphones and tablets, cloud services such as YouTube (News - Alert) have changed how consumers and employees consume information.
“This trend is changing employees’ expectations in the workplace,” noted Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) in a recent paper, OpenTouch Video Store. “They are looking for immediate visual insights that they can make actionable. Leveraging video for collaboration is a great way to achieve this goal.”
Public cloud services such as YouTube don’t fit the bill, however, lacking adequate control mechanisms and other enterprise features.
This is where Alcatel-Lucent’s OpenTouch Video Store makes sense. The OpenTouch Video Store enables enterprises to:
- Create, upload and share videos across their organizations
- Improve audience awareness
- Reduce time-to-information
- Control the videos employees share
In addition, the OpenTouch Video Store reduces operating expense by centralizing management, making deployment easy, and offering it as a scalable software-as-a-service.
The four main advantages of the OpenTouch Video Store are its ability to:
- Leverage user generated content
- Provide an enterprise-grade foundation
- Enable a secure data privacy environment
- Create an optimized automated infrastructure
The OpenTouch Video Store allows employees to upload content, which helps democratize video creation and help cut expenses by no longer needing a professional film and production company to produce videos.
While the ability to upload content is something most users will be familiar with from YouTube and Facebook (News - Alert), the OpenTouch Video Store also plays nicely in the corporate environment. The OpenTouch Video Store, unlike most other cloud-based video-sharing services, allows central control and management of videos.
“The service is integrated with the enterprise ecosystem, especially the corporate directory and Alcatel-Lucent Visual Collaboration Solutions,” according to the paper by Alcatel-Lucent. “Video content can be embedded easily in the enterprise intranet, social networks or any other web sites or collaboration tool.”
A set of APIs enables integration with third-party applications, too.
Security is another important area for enterprises, and the OpenTouch Video Store ensures data privacy through a signed URL mechanism that ensures confidentiality of videos stored in the cloud. It also copies and duplicates videos to ensure that data can be quickly restored in case of service failure.
Finally, the OpenTouch Video Store runs on an automated infrastructure, enabling quick service setup and deployment in the cloud. It comes as a SaaS (News - Alert), providing enterprises with maximum flexibility and control. Administrators can manage the solution through a web interface, can monitor activity in real time, and can create and manage user accounts and profiles.
This adds up to a service that enterprises can use for a number of purposes, including communication with partners, suppliers, customers and employees, as well as e-learning and collaboration.
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Edited by
Peter Bernstein
