Managed Videoconferencing Gets Crystal Clear in HD

Operators are finding that high-definition videoconferencing, including telepresence, is coming out of the boardroom and down to the desktop, shaking loose some serious business opportunities for managed services, often as part of a wider collaboration strategy. It’s a positive trend for carriers looking to broaden the stickiness of their offerings within the enterprise.

The major vendors got into the immersive space to replicate board meetings, but now there’s a trickle-down effect, as more types of video endpoints come online. That will penetrate further and further as mobility takes further hold, too. Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is front of mind in many of the corporations.

“We see many customers that deploy a small number of the telepresence suites in select locations, deploy our LifeSize Room in large conference rooms around the world and enable offices and home office workers with either a LifeSize Passport or LifeSize Express system,” said Michael Helmbrecht, product management director at LifeSize Communications. “HD quality at the price/performance levels available today make it feasible for organizations to enable more sites.”

As a follow-on to that, the types of companies interested in immersive telepresence videoconferencing are not just the Fortune 100 set, by the way. “In terms of the market sweet spot, it’s difficult to pinpoint the sweet spot for telepresence as companies of all sizes and various vertical markets rely on telepresence for their business,” said Helmbrecht. “A very large growth opportunity exists in SMB; what the large enterprise customers have historically realized of the value of telepresence, small and medium businesses are readily adopting.”

Ultimately, players look forward to seeing further advancement toward anytime anywhere HD video. “Cisco has in mind this notion the ability to transcode and change codecs on the fly to run on any format depending on the device,” said Mark Weidick, vice president and general manager for the TelePresence Exchange Business Unit at Cisco Systems Inc. “So we can broadcast on studio-quality HD and you’re on an iPhone and can receive that.”

And, it’s the growing complexity of corporate video needs that’s driving the service provider role in the ecosystem, to an extent. “This is not just telepresence at the high end, and not just for executives,” said Jeff Prestel, general manager of the video business unit at British Telecom Conferencing. “This is video delivered to the masses. Remember when PCs and distributed computing took off in the 90s — the distributed environment is just so much more complex and it requires a provider to really manage that. The exact same thing happens here as video gets driven to the desktop.”

In terms of overall trends, there are a number of macro-economic factors that are giving the idea of pervasive video wings. For one, travel remains expensive and time-consuming, and recession-hit businesses are looking to cut costs and improve productivity while maintaining the relationships crafted through face-to-face contact.

All in all, it’s clear that video is not only becoming an increasing part of the way companies of all sizes do business, but it is also one of the next great opportunities for service providers. “Communications is evolving at an unprecedented velocity and businesses interact in ways that we couldn’t have imagined a decade ago,” said Alan Benway, executive director of product marketing for AT&T Business Solutions, which uses Cisco telepresence gear to offer managed services. “Service providers need to address the needs of businesses to be able to design from anywhere, build anywhere, sell and service anywhere and do it cost-effectively and better than their competitors. Telepresence is the perfect fit for this new way of doing business.”

One big challenge to video everywhere is the fact that deployments often remain islands, and companies want to use HD video to reach partners, customers and suppliers that might be using different equipment. But that’s where service providers and managed services can play a critical role.

BT for instance enables interoperability as a managed service via software, not a hardware gateway. “Many people that claim to do interop, it’s all manual,” said Prestel. “We have software that makes it happen. One of the challenges is that each manufacturer has a different approach and they don’t necessarily talk to each other. But we’re neutral because we have the service in the middle that does the translation. Providers are the glue that allow the phones to talk to each other.”

Providing the ability for endpoints to talk to each other outside of the corporate walls contributes, of course, to uptake. “Most of the customers had an existing video estate that we have integrated or expanded into more of an immersive situation,” said Prestel. “Inter-company functionality however is where strategically this takes off.”

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