Room With a View: Companies, Organizations Find Value in Video

By Paula Bernier

According to a Global IP Solutions (News - Alert)/Research Now survey of 1,200 business professionals in the U.S. and Asia, even before the economic meltdown, videoconferencing was on the rise, with the global businesses, health care companies, courts and other governmental entities deploying large-scale systems in the last 18 months. At the same time, the study notes, we saw the introduction of desktop-based videoconferencing systems, which made videoconferencing a more palatable option to cost-conscious organizations. Further advancing the videoconferencing cause, notes the study, is the fact that business travel continues to decline, but businesses still rely heavily on face-to-face interactions.

The study goes on to report that the majority of survey participants in all countries involved, with the exception of Japan (which had a 47 percent rating), had used videoconferencing based on the video chat function of popular applications such as Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Skype, QQ, or other desktop videoconferencing systems such as Cisco, Polycom (News - Alert) or Tandberg. And most agreed video offers the benefit of enabling clear communication and understanding.

This apparent increased experience with and understanding of the benefits of video helps explain why 40 percent of the U.S.-based survey respondents indicated they will be deploying a video communications solution in the next six to 24 months. In China, 80 percent of those surveyed said their company would be deploying a video solution within the next 18 months.

Of course, video chat, and desktop-based and room-based videoconferencing, which typically involve a relatively small set of participants, are just a few ways that video is addressing the needs of businesses and those in the government and education sectors, notes John Shaw, COO of VBrick (News - Alert), a 12-year-old supplier of IP video platforms.

VBrick offers live and on-demand videoconferencing for one-to-many communications involving very large audiences (like in the tens-of-thousands to hundreds-of-thousands range); IP-based video distribution, which includes digital signage or the ability to bring broadcast TV to user desktops (imagine a stock broker watching CNBC over her computer, for example, or a teacher integrating video into his class curriculum, for example); “enterprise YouTube (News - Alert),” which enables businesses to leverage user-generated video to do training, market from their Web sites and the like; and surveillance and monitoring (Shell Oil uses VBrick to keep an eye on its oil rigs, for example).

Shaw says the large audience, broadcast-style videoconferencing solution VBrick offers is great because any multicast-enabled network can handle the video very economically.

“People can have access to this capability with virtually no network upgrade,” he says, and VBrick can get up and running with as little as $30,000 or, for meetings including several thousand people, in the $70,000 range.

There are some interesting hybrid models of videoconferencing, he adds, that can help control costs and the impact of videoconferencing on the network, as well as encourage people to participate more, noting some individuals are reticent to speak if they know their image will pop up for everybody to see. For example, on a 100-person videoconference, a business might consider putting its six top executives on two-way connections and the other 94 people on streamed connections with the ability to communicate via chat.

Concerning the “enterprise YouTube” video reference, Shaw notes that some businesses not only want to be able to leverage video taken by employees and/or customers and partners wherever they happen to be, but also are interested in turning their existing videoconferencing rooms into studios.

“Polycom and Tandberg (News - Alert) can actually issue a stream, they have the technology to do that, but what they can’t do is actually distribute that stream over a heterogeneous network environment. So that’s where we partner with them very closely,” he says.

Shaw adds the VBrick – which currently offers video portal technology that enables organizations to schedule video meetings, browse and access on-demand video, and integrate PowerPoint into the video – is also hard at work expanding to make video more searchable and integrated with other business applications.

“We’re spending a lot of time breaking those pieces apart,” says Shaw. “We don’t necessarily want to be a destination; I want to make this seamlessly integrated into the content management system that you’re using….”

As Shaw mentions, security and surveillance is another important application for video.

That’s the focus for Grandstream Networks (News - Alert), a privately-held company that started business in 2002 as an ATA supplier, moved into gateways and phones, then video phones and PBXs, and now video surveillance.

Khris Kendrick (News - Alert), senior director of business development at Grandstream Networks, says the company announced the 3511 dome camera, a compact, price effective, HD device, at ITEXPO (News - Alert) East in January. Then, last month, the company unveiled another high-definition camera, the 3611, as well as a low-light device.

The SIP-based cameras are targeted at such entities as apartment and business locations, campuses, casinos, restaurants and retailers. And because the cameras are SIP-based, customers can stream the video they capture to remote mobile or video phones. IT

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