Every second person today is talking about video conferencing, it could be a dedicated room Telepresence kind of setup or a small movable unit or webcams installed on the workstations or even making video calls from your smartphones. All these are forms of Video Conferencing, but all of the sudden what made the entire world fall for Video Conference ?
When recession striked the whole world in 2008, Every company was looking forward to cut down its operating expenditures and travelling was a major expenditure for all the companies... so, companies decided to switch to options like Video Conferences, Conference Bridges, etc... and as the time passed though the world had almost recovered from the economical crisis but Video Conferecing had made itself an important part of every AV & office automation project. lets have a look at the key factors which make VC a critical component in day to day life today -
1. Cost Saving
Companies which swicthed to VC are able to save millions of dollars just by bringing down their travelling expenditures. While discussing a VC requirement with one of my customer, I came to know that they were never worried about the air tickets and hotel expenses, the only thing which bothered them was Dual Presence - lemme explain, whenever they have someone travelling they consider every day spent out of city as two days (May be day & night.. dunno exactly) and if travelled on office holiday, it would be four times (I know you must be thinking - what a lovely company it is). So, on every 10 days official trip any employee was able to earn his one month salary as extra. Honestly that is toooo much travelling expense.
2. Business Agility
Yes... Agility
Without VC anybody who wish to have a meeting face to face, will either have to wait for another person to come or will have to travel all the way to his office. So, Video Conferencing provides you with an option for instant face to face communication. So, with a Video Conferencing setup you can have a face to face meeting within minutes. Isn't it Agile ?
3. Mobility
With 3G & 4G high speed internet bandwidth rolling in via your cellphones you can be a part of any main stream multiparty video conferencing from your laptops, Notebooks, Tabs or even your smartphones. (This sometimes feel like killing... no place to hide ;-) )
Who are the leaders in this Arena ?
Well, when we talk about VC leaders. we would need to divide it into two categories -
1. Hardware Based
2. Software based (Though it too requires endpoint hardware )
Leaders in hardware based VC -
1. Cisco - Cisco was already a leader with its product called Telepresence but after acquiring Tandberg and seamless integration between its software and other hardware, it had become a clear leader in the league.
2. Polycom - Polycom undoubtedly is the biggest competitor to Cisco in this arena and probably has a bigger installbase than Cisco but because of the complete end to end product range for VoIP & IP telephony, VC & saftware based integration, Cisco would remain the winner
There are few more niche players fighting among themselves to establish themselve in the league
Leaders in Software based VC -
1. Webex - Webex is a product from the house of Cisco and a early entrant into this arena. Webex comes with phenomenal quality, a trusted brand name and worldclass technical support from Cisco
2. Peoplelink - Peoplelink is another vendor this arena with a good piece software, good licensing model and fully functional multi-party conference (This feature works better than Webex) but never tried their technical support. So, cant comment on it.
And alst but not the least we should not miss
Lifesize - Well, I dont know much about this product and havent even seen this working anywhere so far but this product had created enough buzzword about its HD video conferencing capablities at a very low bandwidth requirement @ 768KBPS - Isnt that amazing ??
And if that is true, what the hell is happening at Cisco's Telepresence R&D centers ??
Wish to know how products work on hosted models - These posts might help -