TMCnet Feature

In the information and communications technology market, the observation that necessity is the mother of invention is probably better restated as opportunity is the mother of invention.

Take video services, for example. As bandwidth capacities have grown over the years — both for wireline and wireless networks — video services that previously were unsupportable have sprung from the woodwork.

Stefan Karapetkov (News - Alert), who heads up the Emerging Technologies division at Polycom, pointed out in a conversation with TMC CEO Rich Tehrani that, only a few years ago, video networks were able to support only a few hundred conference rooms and perhaps a few thousand total clients. Today, that’s grown exponentially: thanks to platforms like Polycom’s RealPresence, up to 75,000 registrants and up to 25,000 concurrent video calls are possible.

The dramatic network scalability for visual communications has been a major focus for Polycom recently. It will be a major focus for the company at ITEXPO East, where Karapetkov and several of his colleagues are participating in sessions. (Karapetkov is speaking at a session on HD videoconferencing and collaboration).

Visual communications and mobile video are major market trends, Karapetkov said during the conversation with Tehrani. He predicted that, by the end of this year, business-to-business visual communications will be commonplace.

The full conversation with Karapetkov is below.

What was the most significant technological advancement in the past 12 months and why?

The most significant technological advancement in visual communications is the dramatic increase of network scalability. Video networks just a year or two ago were only able to support few hundreds of conference rooms and maybe few thousands of personal systems or clients in total. Today, they can support tens of thousands of users. For example, the Polycom RealPresence Platform supports up to 75,000 registrants and up to 25,000 concurrent calls in a super cluster configuration. Super clusters provide the ultimate reliability and resilience. If a node, a super-node, or a conference server fail, existing calls stay up while new calls are connected using alternative resources in the network.

What has been the biggest trend in your market segment and how is it impacting your customers?

The biggest trend in the visual communications market is mobile video.

The network effect is already spreading video to the masses as human culture and technology become increasingly visual. Now mobile video conferencing is poised for significant growth, driven by the demand for video communications, an increasingly remote workforce, and a convergence of technical advances.

Today, organizations tend to be more geographically dispersed and virtual, with more than 1 billion teleworkers globally. At the same time, technology advancements are driving the visual mobile society, including the proliferation of camera-equipped mobile tablets and smartphones; the advent of 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi networks; and cloud delivered services. In fact, Gartner (News - Alert) remains bullish on the opportunity for the media tablet market forecasting over 320 million units sold in 2015, with cumulatively over 900 million sold by the end of that year. And by 2015, the number of people participating in video chats is forecast to grow 14 times to more than 140 million.

Leading the trend to mobile video, Polycom released Polycom RealPresence Mobile, the first enterprise HD video software solution for tablets that extends Polycom's HD video collaboration technology beyond the office and conference room to deliver to tablets the same high-quality, secure, and reliable video experience customers are accustomed to inside the office. It is available today on Apple iPad 2, Motorola (News - Alert) XOOM, Samsung GALAXY Tab 10.1, and Motorola DROID XYBOARD, with more mobile devices to follow.

What is the biggest challenge facing your customers today and how is your company helping address that challenge?

Visual communication offers a robust and cost-efficient alternative to travel and to voice-only connections; it accelerates business communications and allows decisions to be made faster in distributed environments.

The biggest challenge for our customers is speed decision-making and maintaining business continuity when natural or man-made disasters interrupt traditional business processes. This issue is gaining importance as organizations and teams are becoming increasingly distributed.

In the last few years, visual communications played critical role in recovering from all major natural or man-made disasters. During the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, for example, visual communication links were quickly setup between USA, U.S. ships in the Pacific Ocean, and rescue teams on the ground which allowed for speedy decision making in rapidly changing environment.   

How has the cloud impacted your business? How has it impacted your customers?

The cloud allows service providers to offer video-as-a-service (VaaS) solutions to its customers. Cloud-based visual communication solutions, such as the Polycom RealPresence Cloud, are designed specifically for service providers and equip them with the carrier-grade infrastructure, endpoints, and services they need to offer businesses of all sizes subscription-based solutions for video collaboration.

Cloud offerings accelerate the penetration and adoption of video collaboration solutions among SMBs (small to medium sized businesses) and enterprises that want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand, or a pure VaaS solution.

Several carriers around the world are currently using the RealPresence Platform as the enabler for VaaS solutions. For example, China Unicom has created one of the largest video clouds in the world, powered by the RealPresence Platform, which enables the delivery of VaaS to more than 10,000 business and government organizations throughout China.

Will cloud-based communications expedite the end of the premises-based PBX (News - Alert) market?

As PBX manufacturers are declaring “end of life” for older PBXs, customers are feeling the pressure to upgrade to newer systems. Since many customers do not want to be locked into another on-premise solution, hosted communication is becoming very attractive alternative.

Wainhouse Research predicts the five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the hosted and managed unified communications (UC) market worldwide is forecast to be 30.7 percent with revenues of approximately $5 billion in 2015.

What approach has your business taken to social media? If you have implemented a social media program, have you been able to evaluate your program’s success?

According to a recent forecast from IDC, the social platform market is expected to grow nearly 400 percent in the next few years, from $667 million in 2011 to nearly $2.9 billion in 2015. Social media is finding its way into the enterprise with companies such as Jive and Yammer being used for intra-organizational communication.

Since voice and video are natural extension of social media communication, Polycom signed a strategic agreement with Jive to integrate Polycom HD video collaboration into Jive's social business platform. The solution will allow Jive customers to conduct live video chats, including group video calls, as well as record video meetings or messages for archiving, training, and ongoing collaboration. Initiating HD video meetings from the Jive platform is the new way to get business done, increasing productivity and efficiency for our customers.

Does every business need a social media presence? Why or why not?

Yes. Social media represent powerful new channels to interact with customers. When customers look for expertise in a particular area, they increasingly use search engines to find information about the market and technology. A major advantage of social media is that it is searchable and appears in search engine results.

Polycom leverages all forms of social media — from LinkedIn to Facebook to Twitter to blogging — and takes interaction with customers to the next level. New information is not only posted on Polycom web pages but also tweeted and linked to posts in various social media platforms and blogs.

Social media are critical in my thought leadership role at Polycom, and blogging proved to be the most suitable way to discuss new developments in visual communications. My blog, Video Networker, covers topics such as HD video, content sharing, and wideband audio. It discusses both the applications and the underlying technology — scalability, management, security, for example — that make these applications possible.

With Microsoft (News - Alert) touting tight integration between its mobile and desktop OS, can it become a major competitor in the enterprise mobile market?

Microsoft is already a major competitor in the enterprise UC market and could extend its leadership into enterprise mobile communications, with variety of mobile devices and clients becoming “optimized for Microsoft Lync.”

Polycom has expanded interoperability with Microsoft Lync to additional Polycom SIP-based wired and wireless voice products. Polycom provides more than 40 systems that enhance Microsoft Lync environments and make collaborating by video, voice, or content-sharing easier, from the board room to the desktop or on-the-go. Connecting Microsoft and Polycom solutions for IM/presence, web conferencing, video, voice, and other UC applications into an interoperable environment enables users to quickly find each other and launch video and voice calls easily and intuitively.

What can attendees expect from your company at ITEXPO?

I will be speaking in the session “Beyond travel avoidance – the real value of HD videoconferencing and collaboration” (CC-09) on Thursday, February 2 at 2pm in room B211 and in the session “Can UC in the Cloud?” (CL-26) on Friday, February 3 at 9am in room B213.

My colleague Jeff Rodman, Founder and Chief Evangelist for Polycom, will be speaking in the session “HD Voice: Improving Voice Quality to Meet Demands of U.S. Customers” (NG-09) on Thursday, February 2 at 2pm in room B116.

Make one technology prediction for 2012 and consider its impact.

Business-to-business visual communications will become commonplace by the end of 2012. This will allow organizations to use their immersive telepresence and other video systems not only internally but also for communication with other organizations, for example, customers, suppliers, and partners. This will allow speedy decision-making and accelerated innovation across organizations worldwide. Service providers will play a central role in this first step to ubiquitous B2B visual communications.

To be held Jan. 31- Feb. 3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami, Fla. ITEXPO East 2012 is the world’s premier IP communications event. Visit Polycom in booth #806A. For more information on ITEXPO registration click here. Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO… Follow us on Twitter.