Vendor Accent

The convergence of video and IP telephony

Video conferencing has not lived up to its initial promise, but things may be about to change, says Yugal Sharma.

Video conferencing is certainly not a new application to enterprise users. Room-to-room video conferencing has grown from its introduction at the World’s Fair in 1964 to a widely deployed enterprise application around the globe. Video conferencing as a general business application however, while promising to become mainstream for the last 50 years, has remained a special purpose application and a niche market.

Video conferencing’s inherent benefits, such as facilitating more in-depth interaction levels for business meetings and reducing travel expenses, have often been offset by a number of technology and operational issues. Expanded bandwidth and special networking requirements have limited its integration with the enterprise’s overall communication network and made it an overlay application that required special attention and administration. Room-to-room sessions often required reservations and technical support in setting up the conference and utilising the features of the video conference. Reliability and quality factors often marred the experience among users. These and other factors have tended to limit the growth of video conferencing, especially in small and medium-size enterprises without the technical resources to support the application.

But a number of changes have occurred recently that are stimulating an increased interest in video conferencing as a mainstream business application. The first change has been the growing deployment of IP telephony within businesses based on the convergence of voice and data networks into a single integrated and robust network with sufficient bandwidth to accommodate video applications. By creating a networking layer that can easily incorporate video streams into its transport mechanisms, the move to IP networks has broken down one of the technical barriers to broader deployment of video conferencing.

A second change enabled by IP telephony is the ability to set up sessions that can carry multiple media streams while using telephony and Windows-based interfaces to achieve click-to-dial video conferencing set-ups between parties on the conference. Multi-party conferences can also be set up using video bridge technologies in a similar manner.

A final factor that is facilitating a leap in the ease of use of video conferencing is the incorporation of SIP-enabled presence within soft phone applications. This technology allows users at their desktops trying to set up a video conference to know if the person they are connecting to has the ability to enable a video call from their end. Video conferencing can be easily added to a voice call by simply activating the video application on each end of the existing call.

The migration to IP telephony, along with the incorporation of standards-based interfaces to other applications, promises to open the door to a rapid expansion of video conferencing. Ironically, video conferencing is being discovered as a ‘new’ IP-enabled productivity application.

In addition, the extension of business telephony features to video endpoint devices makes video calling as natural as voice calling, while providing enterprise-class call-handling capabilities and scalability. For example, users can now have the ability to set up a call coverage path for a video call in the same way and with the same capabilities as a voice call. If somebody calls on a video endpoint and the called party is not at their desk, a coverage path would direct the call to voicemail or a coverage assistant. The system can recognise whether the receiving endpoint (i.e. voicemail system or coverage assistant) has video capabilities, and if not, the call would fall back to a voice-only call. Easy call set-up and coverage features are taken for granted in voice communications systems, but have not been available for video until now.

Based on 2004 and 2005 results, Wainhouse Research recently projected a five-year compound growth rate of over 18 percent for enterprise video conferencing and a 40 percent growth rate in the personal video conferencing category that includes the integration of video into enterprise desktop software.

The ability to expand video conferencing to any IP telephony connection has the potential to deliver substantial business and employee productivity value to enterprises. Extending video interaction to employee conferences can make sessions more focussed, productive and potentially shorter because clarity and real-time decision-making are facilitated. It also promises to enhance the development of personal relationships, particularly with colleagues, distribution partners, clients and suppliers. By increasing ease of use including the use of ad hoc sessions, and eliminating the requirement to leave one’s office to achieve a video connection, video conferencing is likely to become incorporated as an integral part of everyday operations facilitating new ways of doing business.

Requirements for video telephony

While the convergence of technology trends has enabled the arrival of mainstream video conferencing application capability, to achieve mass acceptance and deployment communications applications providers will need to address requirements at three levels. The next generation of video conferencing will have to address overall business drivers, cost, manageability requirements of an enterprise’s IT group, and the usability requirements of employees.

No matter how impressive new technology capabilities might be, they need to justify their acquisition by rationalising how they serve enterprise business objectives. Mainstream deployment of enterprise video conferencing must be built upon business case justification that includes facilitating global business growth, decreasing or offsetting existing business costs, improving employee productivity, and enabling virtual business models with highly mobile workforce groups.

The next threshold that must be addressed is the specific requirement of IT decision makers in adopting widespread application deployment. IT managers require applications that are easy to install, operate and manage. New applications must also integrate easily with the existing network and applications infrastructure, leverage that infrastructure, and thereby increase its value and payback. Open standards are often a critical requirement for new applications because they facilitate integration and prevent vendor ‘lock-in.’ IT managers are also concerned about the economic payback for new application deployment that dovetails with enterprise business objectives.

The third set of requirements that video conferencing must address is meeting the needs of the employee user community. New technology acceptance and adoption can sometimes be pushed from power user communities which are driving for greater personal productivity tools. Widespread user adoption of desktop video conferencing will require that the application be simple, easy and convenient to use. It must also markedly improve personal productivity, enhance working relationships, and lead to faster and more efficient decision-making among collaborative groups within the enterprise.

Video conferencing tightly integrated into telephony has the potential to meet the business, IT and user requirements that will open it up to an impressive adoption rate over the next few years and move the application from a specialty to a mainstream productivity tool.

The author is Country Manager, India & Saarc, Polycom.
He may be contacted at yugal.sharma@polycom.com