Conferencing and Collaboration – Doing More with Less

By Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

IP-based conferencing and collaboration continue to get easier to use, have more features (like wideband audio and high fidelity video) and are becoming less expensive. Moreover, many vendors now want to enter the space with some kind of videoconferencing solution. They’re either waiting for a way to make and deploy them inexpensively or else they’re waiting for a video-related killer app that will move the equipment at a higher price. We’re even seeing the growth of “virtual events” complete with professional networking and social networks based on rich media conferencing. Conferencees and collaborators are also increasingly mobile - but watch out for that interference nicknamed “Blackberry buzz”!

Founded in 2003, WideBand Solutions (http://www.widebandsolutions.com) set out to develop a new generation of high-end audio conferencing products. Their inspiration came from the shift of analog telephony to high definition voice via the Internet and the growing demand for global communications.

Co-Founder and President Lonny Bowers says, “We found our biggest users to be Fortune 1000 companies and larger. All of these companies have some type of investment in a PBX or are moving into VoIP. What we did was to design our conference system to allow these phones from Avaya, Cisco, Nortel and Siemens to connect directly to our system. This allows for several things to happen. For example, I have an Avaya VoIP phone in my desk. In my conference room there’s the same VoIP phone. So all the features on my desktop phone can also now be found in the conference room. I don’t have to pull in an analog phone line to the conference room, which was a typical occurrence until we came along. We can use any of these types of phones to engage our conference system, with its volume control, muting, and so forth.”

“As it relates to high-definition [HD], a term which can include ‘wideband audio’ conferencing,” says Bowers, “most phone makers involved in VoIP, including the Nortels, Avayas and Ciscos, either have or will be releasing some type of HD voice codec, such as G.722, but theirs will be proprietary for internal VoIP calls. When you plug that phone into our system, you’re now doing HD voice calls, which normally have the same quality as videoconferencing. One major company has our systems in all of their conference rooms scattered throughout the world. So when Japan talks to Mountain View, California, or Mountain View talks to India, they benefit from the 7 kHz quality that’s already built into these phones, especially when you’re talking to people for whom English is a second or third language.”

“As far as corporate telephony trends,” says Bowers, “there’s definitely a move to VoIP and as more people move to VoIP, they’ll definitely be able to benefit from having this HD 7 kHz voice codec quality.”

BCS Global (http://www.bcsglobal.com) a leading, global provider of managed video conferencing solutions, can deliver to businesses various virtual communication tools such as the Virtual Presence and iView suite of services. Their fully managed video conferencing solutions work with your existing infrastructure at whatever location. Virtual Presence and iView (for video conferences while traveling, operating a small business or working from a home office) can connect different offices and satellite or home office locations - even from desktop PCs or laptops on the road. As a fully managed service, neither you nor your IT staff needs to be video experts to use it.

Stuart Gold, Vice President of Global Marketing for BCS Global, says, “If we had this conversation a year ago, we’d be spending time on standard definition video conferencing in a conference room. Now the market for video two-way communication and collaboration has gone not only out of the boardroom and into the executive desktop and on the road, it has now also gone up the spectrum as well with HD codecs and now telepresence and more exciting stuff. How that all plays together is becoming more important. We’re of the belief that the basic need of collaboration and conferencing has usually been the hardware, and is followed up in tandem with the network. What we’re finding now is a shift in interest to the user applications and the services that are becoming more of the value-driver for the end user, whereas the other, hardware piece is becoming more commoditized.”

“There’s a lot of exciting things happening in this industry,” says Gold. “Prices are dropping, things are moving forward. Big companies are getting involved. This is all good. Through

our relationships and interconnects and what we call our Virtual Communication Exchange, we are able to provide service anywhere in the world. We have partners on both the white label side and we go direct to our customers. If you were in the U.K., for example, Cable & Wireless is actually reselling our service as their own. In Canada, Rodgers resells our Virtual Presence as Rodgers Virtual Presence, and in China, we’ll be doing the same thing with Shanghai Telecom. We also work with the traditional reseller channels as well. We don’t sell hardware and we don’t sell network minutes. We really are focused on the application; on making video work the way customers expect it to and that’s really our value proposition. When customers have a business need for bringing in video, it’s not an IP manager who makes that decision, it’s a business person with a business problem to solve. Our Virtual Presence solution will bridge the gap between expectations and reality, no matter what problems the customer may have.”

Conferencing and collaboration is increasingly done by mobile users. Genesys Conferencing (http://www.genesys.com) recently brought the Apple iPhone into the orbit of its standards-based AJAX technology of the Genesys Meeting Center 4.0. Users can now easily join a voice and web meeting through the iPhone’s Safari browser. Version 4.0 itself is quite impressive, supporting real-time collaboration (real-time online presentations, and the sharing of documents and applications). All features regularly viewable on a desktop during a web meeting are supported on the iPhone with zoom-in capabilities and portrait/landscape view. The speed depends on your WiFi or EDGE connection speed.

Tony Terranova, Vice President of Product Marketing at Genesys, notes, “When you join the meeting, Genesys calls you. You don’t have to enter meeting numbers and pin codes. You just click and your phone rings. This works as well with the iPhones. When you get an invitation, if you’ve participated in a prior Genesys meeting, then your name and phone number will already be embedded in the system. You just have to click okay and your cell phone rings. In more than 20 percent of conference calls today, participants are using a cell phone. Many times there is concern over the cost for all of these cell phones to dial into one system. This eliminates that problem. That’s huge. Because whenever I’m traveling I have to print out the number that I’m supposed to dial in or toggle back-and-forth on my Blackberry to look up what the number is, then remember it or write it down. Our new ability to get of all of those procedures makes it so much more hassle-free to join a call when you are traveling with your cell phone.”

One Step at a Time

SKC Communications Products (http://www.skccom.com) is a communications solutions provider, basically a ‘one-stop shopping’ integrator, that helps their clients ‘collaborate, communicate and connect’ with their key audiences. They work directly with Avaya and other industry partners. They play in four different communications lines: Phone systems such as Avaya’s, head sets, videoconferencing, and custom room audio-visual integration.

“The industry buzz is about unified communications,” says Jeff Holton, SKC’s General Manager on the Avaya integration team. “Many manufacturers out there are calling their products ‘unified communications’, which indicates how much buzz is out there.”

“We also do a lot of work with presence and SIP [Session Initiation Protocol],” says Holton. “SIP is another ‘other’ industry buzzword, along with ‘presence’, ‘unified communications’ and ‘mobility’. In the Avaya world, we do a lot with SIP. Avaya has done a lot with SIP; they’ve worked to ratify the SIP standard for years now.”

“We work with a lot of customers to provide them with presence technology,” says Holton, “because many customers want to be able to see the status of people: Are they on the phone? Are they away from their desk? Are they available for a call? They also want to integrate that capability into a corporate-wide instant messaging capability, so they can IM people. Many call centers are looking at that now, because today, a call center agent gets a call, and normally they might have to find a product specialist or a call center supervisor to answer a question for them. And if the agent must use a phone or physically walk somewhere, then that call will take a longer time than if they can simply use IM to contact a specialist or supervisor, so the agent can now have more minutes to answer calls.”

Holton elaborates: “The great thing about this technology, from a mobility, UC and a presence standpoint, is that it’s really a matter of, ‘What does the customer want to do?’ What is their corporate goal and objective? From there, we take that information and custom design a solution for them. Avaya doesn’t ‘pigeonhole’ any customers. Everything is customizable. The idea is that they can take their own path, pace and choice. So we ask customers about their goals for the next three months, six months, year, and two years down the road, so that way, as we’re designing the solution, it will not only meet their present goals, but also their corporate initiatives appearing down the road.”

“Videoconferencing has always been a high-growth business for us,” says Holton. “SKC is a leader from the videoconferencing standpoint, for both Polycom and Tandberg. We do a lot of videoconferencing installations for many Fortune 500 customers across the USA. It’s exciting because there’s also a direct integration to the telephony system that we sell from Avaya. Avaya, the leader in IP telephony, and Polycom, the leader in videoconferencing can be integrated so that videoconferencing can be an extension off an Avaya phone switch. It’s like making a phone call. We also see that integration from a unified communications standpoint. But certainly we see videoconferencing as a very big growth industry for SKC. Even before Polycom acquired Spectralink, we were familiar with Spectralink’s WiFi phones, since that was Avaya’s choice for a wireless handset provider. So we have many deployments of Spectralink equipment too.”

“Many customers are also looking at a ‘meet-me’ type of conferencing arrangement,” says Holton. “Working with Avaya systems, we provide six-port meet-me capability, so customers can have their own extension or DID number to connect to this. Yes, we’re seeing more ‘ad hoc’ conferencing occurring out there, because the current technology allows customers and end users to be able to easily dial an extension and immediately end up in an audio conference. In the past, you needed a person to schedule the conference and maintain the bridge. But with ‘meet-me’ conferencing, people don’t have to walk across campus to a conference room; they can all just jump on a call and the conference automatically sets itself up.”

Where Social Networking Meets Conferencing

Given the huge popularity of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Orkut, Photobucket and Xanga, it makes sense that one of these social networking websites, HeyCosmo.com (http://www.heycosmo.com), would integrate live video and audio conferencing, as well as live chat and real-time desktop sharing. HeyCosmo, launched by Arsenal Interactive in Mountain View, California, allows up to 50 people to simultaneously watch, create, broadcast and share video, audio, or anything else you can bring up on your screen, seamlessly. HeyCosmo’s technology supports up to 10 live webcam video participants, and up to 50 people can listen, watch, and chat during the session. During its launch, HeyCosmo held a live, multi-playable Texas Hold’em poker game, demonstrating the site’s virtual gaming capabilities. Is HeyCosmo the future of Web 2.0 conferencing? Only time will tell.

Virtual Events

Unisfair (http://www.unisfair.com) is the leading provider of virtual trade shows, virtual expos, virtual conferences, virtual job fairs and virtual marketing events.

Brent Arslaner, Vice President of Marketing, says, “We provide a full virtual event environment for both enterprise as well as media and publishing companies. Here, let’s take a tour of the virtual Automated Test Summit 2007.” With that, my PC screen displayed what looked like the vast orifice of a convention center.

“This is the grand entranceway into the virtual event,” says Arslaner. “Such events include our multisession conference tracks, exhibitor floor, exhibitor booths and resource centers as well as professional networking capabilities. We provide interactivity among the organizers, sponsors as well as the attendees of these virtual events. Just to give you some examples, we’ve done over 200 virtual events to date. They include everything from virtual trade shows, conferences, job fairs, sales training events and user conferences. These are just a few examples of the types of events that have leveraged our platform.”“At the end of the day, we combine rich multimedia content with professional networking and interactivity,” says Arlsaner. “We have a very robust intelligence, so that all of the activity in the environment is tracked for various purposes.”

Yes, all very interesting, but where’s the virtual Pepsi to drink in the virtual show office? IT

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

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