Among all the vertical industries Accordent has served over the last decade, we've seen especially strong adoption of enterprise webcasting in the financial services sector.  In fact, 90% of the world's top 25 largest financial services firms use our solutions - and they do so aggressively.  In fact, almost all of these organizations have graduated from doing the infrequent event - such as a shareholder meeting - and are now driving full-blown online communication initiatives which often entail daily, live, interactive webcasts to thousands of employees around the globe.

So what is it about the needs of this particular industry that has compelled them to make webcasting integral to their operations?  To find out, we reached out to many of these organizations and did a review of how they were using webcasting.  In doing so, we discovered remarkable similarities among them: Each firm used webcasting as a way for executives to make a highly personal and engaging connection to far-flung troops, to reinforce a sense of common culture and purpose, to rapidly disseminate information, and to motivate and retain top talent.

Certainly, some of the unique qualities of this industry also came into play.  All of these firms:

• operate in a rapidly changing landscape
• place a high value on employees
• need real-time communication capabilities
• understand that technology is a competitive advantage
• focused initially on corporate communications, but envisioned a wide array of applications down the road

The more we thought about these attributes, the more we struggled to think of an industry that does not currently operate in a rapidly changing landscape or one that wouldn't benefit by adopting these values.

Which leads us to the final, shared ingredient: at all of these firms, the webcasting initiative was driven by the vision and commitment of senior executives to embrace a new technology.

Which then made us wonder: can you judge the innovation of an entire market segment by their rate of adoption of online visual communications technologies?

Let us know what you think, and what you're seeing in your industry...