Video conferencing is a tool that brings in significant reductions in travel expenses, giving the decision makers a space for digital convergence, bringing them together for a live meeting. The technology holds tremendous promise within the enterprise environment.

Expanded collaboration, where video would be integrated with voice and data applications, has been widely anticipated as commercially feasible. But somehow it never really materialized. Large enterprises have implemented video for group conferencing applications, but video conferencing has often remained a niche application running parallel to the core of an enterprise's communications fabric. As expected with a specialized application, it found a useful place for large meetings and presentations. However, challenges around quality and reliability and ease of administration and use have limited its acceptance within many businesses. In addition, collaboration tools such as electronic blackboards, overhead projectors and fax capabilities never worked as a single well-integrated application. As a result, enterprises were never able to realize the potential benefits of video conferencing.

Mainstream deployment of enterprise video conferencing must be built upon business case justification

However, a major development that recently occurred in the communications environment. It is likely to break down the limitations that have suppressed the growth of video conferencing. The migration to converged IP networks and the spread of IP Telephony has provided a receptive platform infrastructure that can enable video to become a fully integrated element in the telephony environment. This platform, combined with the technological advancements in video and collaboration tools are ushering in a new era of video telephony. Video telephony technology is now ready for prime time within the enterprise communication environment. Here it is worth mentioning that many hurdles have been overcome to reach to the mainstream video telephony by deploying new video conferencing technologies.

The Convergence of Video and IP Telephony
A number of changes have occurred recently that are stimulating an increased interest in video conferencing as a mainstream business application. The first change has been the growing deployment in businesses of IP Telephony based upon converging voice and data networks into a single integrated and robust network with enough bandwidth to accommodate video applications. By creating a networking layer that can easily incorporate video streams into its transport mechanisms, the move to IP networks has broken down one of the technical barriers to broader deployment of video conferencing.

A second change enabled by IP telephony is the ability to set up sessions that can carry multiple media streams while using telephony and windows based interfaces to achieve click-to-dial video conferencing setups between parties on the conference. Multi-party conferences can also be set up using video bridge technologies in a similar fashion.

A final factor that facilitates the ease of use for video conferencing is the incorporation of SIP enabled presence in soft phone applications. This technology allows users at their desktops trying to set up a video conference to know if the person they are connecting to has the ability to enable a video call from their end. Video conferencing can be easily added to a voice call by simply activating the video application on each end of the existing call. The migration to IP telephony along with the incorporation of standards based interfaces to other applications promises to open the door to a rapid expansion of video conferencing. Ironically, video conferencing is being discovered as a “new” IP enabled productivity application.

In addition, the extension of business telephony features to endpoint devices makes video calling as natural as voice calling. During all this it provides enterprise class call handling capabilities and scalability. For example, users now can have the ability to setup a call coverage path for a video call in the same way and with the same capabilities as a voice call. If somebody calls on a video endpoint and the called party is not at their desk, a coverage path would direct the call to voicemail or a coverage assistant. The system can recognize whether the receiving endpoint (ie voicemail system or coverage assistant) has video capabilities. If not, the call would fall back to a voice only call. Easy call set up and coverage features are taken for granted in voice communications systems but have not been available for video until now.

Wainhouse Research recently projected a five year compound growth rate of over 18% for enterprise video conferencing and a 40% growth rate in the personal video conferencing category that includes the integration of video into enterprise desktop software, based upon 2004 and 2005 results.
The ability to expand video conferencing to any IP telephony connection has the potential to deliver substantial business and employee productivity value to enterprises. Extending video interaction to employee conferences can make sessions more focused, productive and potentially shorter as clarity and real time decision-making are facilitated. It also promises to enhance the development of personal relationships – particularly with colleagues, distribution partners, clients and suppliers. By increasing ease of use including the use of ad hoc sessions and eliminating the requirement to leave one's office to achieve a video connection, video conferencing is likely to become incorporated as integral part of everyday operations facilitating new ways of doing business.

Customer Requirements for a Video Telephony Solution
While the convergence of technology trends has enabled the arrival of mainstream video conferencing application capability, to achieve mass acceptance and deployment, communications applications providers will need to address requirements at three levels. The next generation of video conferencing will have to address overall business drivers, cost and manageability requirements of an enterprise's IT group and finally the usability requirements of employees.

No matter how impressive new technology capabilities might be, they need to justify their acquisition by rationalizing how they serve enterprise business objectives. Mainstream deployment of enterprise video conferencing must be built upon business case justification that includes facilitating global business growth, decreasing or offsetting existing business costs, improving employee productivity and enabling virtual business models with highly mobile workforce groups.

The next threshold that must be addressed is the specific requirements of IT decision makers in adopting widespread application deployment. IT managers require applications that are easy to install, operate and manage. New applications must also integrate easily with their existing network and applications infrastructure and leverage that infrastructure and thereby increase its value and payback. Open standards are often a critical requirement for new applications because it facilitates integration and prevents vendor 'Lock-in'.

Finally, IT managers are concerned about the economic payback for new application deployment that dovetails with enterprise business objectives. The third set of requirements that video conferencing must address is meeting the needs of the employee user community. New technology acceptance and adoption can sometimes be pushed from power user communities who are driving for greater personal productivity tools. Widespread user adoption of desktop video conferencing will require that the application be simple, easy and convenient to use. It must also markedly improve personal productivity, enhance working relationships, and lead to faster and more efficient decision making among collaborative groups within the enterprise.

Video conferencing tightly integrated with telephony has the potential to meet the business, IT, and user requirements. It will open it up to an impressive adoption rate over the next few years and move the application from a specialty to a mainstream productivity tool.

Richard Kent and Harold Tepper
Courstesy: Polycom

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