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The potential for conferencing solutions in India is huge, with online collaboration now being adopted across all verticals, including health and medicine and government. With this, the rate of adoption of videoconferencing within the country is set to increase.

Business conferences and decision-making options depend critically on the availability of information at the right time. In order to save time, business meetings are increasingly being conducted over telecommunication networks with the help of videoconferencing, telepresence and Web-conferencing.

Benefiting All
One of the crucial factors leading to the adoption of videoconferencing is the recent development that the concept of videoconferencing can also be applied in rural areas of India for distance learning/education of children located in remote areas; and to inform farmers about the need of pesticides, giving them proper agricultural and primary education. Besides, it also helped in introduction of concepts like telemedicine in India, where healthcare direction can be rendered to far off villages and cities from advance countries.

Beyond the cost benefits, it also helps organizations maximize their business efficiency with fewer resources, eliminating physical distance between customers, suppliers and traveling staff and helps speed up the decision making process, scaling knowledge and encouraging work balance.

Today, Web-conferencing in India is also witnessing increased growth as enterprises are realizing its added benefits like being on hosted services. Rather than investing in a product and enterprises, individuals can do a Web-conference as and when the need arises, with no investment. This is accelerating the adoption of Web-conferencing.

The hi-tech industry, BFSI, and consulting are some key verticals that see increasing usage of Web-conferencing in India. With technological advancements like presentation sharing, application sharing and remote control, high performance and reliability, Web-conferencing is becoming easy.

Globalization is happening fast and communication technologies are helping eradicate geographical boundaries. Video is gaining importance due to cross-cultural, collaborative engagement between employees and organizations.

Share of Challenges
While videoconferencing has seen an increase in uptake, the technology in its basic form has its share of challenges. Videoconferences, in particular, have been difficult to set up, challenging to use, and frequently unsatisfying in their ability to replicate in-person meetings and the benefits of face-to-face interaction. To improve this situation, companies are working on a new technology that delivers a unique, in-person experience over the converged network. Conferencing solutions are becoming an integral part of the corporate strategy of enterprises at all levels, be it telepresence solutions, or the basic desktop conferencing.

Developments in telemedicine, distance learning, and e-governance are likely to contribute to the spread of video as part of unified communication solutions as well. There is also strong evidence that point-to-point, standalone videoconferencing solutions are expected to all but disappear as the shift to IP accelerates and vendor partnerships continue to drive the convergence landscape.

New Arrivals
The latest innovation in technology has been the introduction of telepresence solutions. With this solution, one can experience life-size remote participants, fluid motion, accurate flesh tones, studio quality acoustics and lighting, true-life pictures with a true eye-contact or an approximation of it, and immersive environments that establish collective experience among disparate locations.

Polycom has recently introduced the Real Presence HD solution, designed to further eliminate barriers of a geographically dispersed workforce by providing a unique and cost-effective engrossing and interactive telepresence meeting experience. This extremely high-quality solution is able to seamlessly connect a virtually limitless number of sites, and people in other Polycom RPX suites, standards-based videoconference rooms, and video-enabled IP telephony and presence-based desktop systems. Polycom truly believes that India is a ripe market for a space that is worth around $3 bn worldwide.

Another development is on the SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) platform, expected to be the protocol of future videoconferencing.

The Next Step
Web-conferencing is another hot new technology that is available in the market. SaaS-based models are also increasingly becoming popular. The whole atmosphere is gearing up for unified collaboration.

Areas such as high definition (HD) videoconferencing, including HD-based desktop conferencing, immersive real presence videoconferencing solution in a cinematic view with HD video, stereo surround sound, hi-resolution content, and mobile videoconferencing solution will be the attraction in coming months. 3G-based video applications on IP platform may also be the application of the future.

The future is the sum of several independent innovations coming together, where one network brings all types of information (voice/data/video) into the home, office, and industry. Organizations are using Web collaboration that works on your enterprise network, helps view and annotate documents online. Sharing of applications or the entire desktop and demonstrating applications live and in real-time is another extremely important feature.

Several companies are focusing their efforts on driving the growth for collaboration technologies. They believe that features with video interfaces must be supported by video endpoints in a converged conference to create a truly unified communications experience. Collaborative technologies will enable business partners to easily switch back and forth from Web, video and audio-conferencing, to see and hear each other and share documents in real time.