Powered by technological advances that, among other
capabilities, permit users to include participants with mobile phones, tablets
and desktop browsers in increasingly high-quality videoconferences, new
entrants and longtime suppliers alike are helping corporate clients make better
use of videoconferencing equipment.
Maturing technology means that tools used within corporate
programs can establish through cloud-based software and other systems
multipoint connections without traditional bridges. It also means, perhaps,
slower growth for full-room, immersive telepresence systems. Meanwhile,
corporations' reliance on remote conferencing generally, according to a BTN survey conducted in January and
February, has not waned. Only 12 percent of 108 meeting and travel manager
respondents indicated that their organizations during the prior six months hadn't
conducted any such conferences.
[Please click here to
view the digital edition of BTN's videoconferencing
research, featuring all charted data and downloadable as a pdf.]
Discussing the preponderance of existing systems, Marty
Hollander, senior vice president of market development at videoconferencing
supplier Vidyo, said that "there's no such thing as a green field in a
large company. They all have somebody's system."
What they also usually have are many corporate travelers who
increasingly are inclined to use their own devices for tasks related to travel
and meetings, including participation in videoconferences. Connecting those
users to conferences held at corporate facilities or to other travelers is a
key driver of the development of the new architectures.
"Our value proposition is in enabling businesses to
connect people who can get to their special videoconferencing rooms to people
who can't," said Stu Aaron, chief commercial officer of Blue Jeans
Network, a three-year-old supplier of cloud conferencing technology. Using a
dial-in number and a passcode, similar to the typical setup for an
audioconference, participants can connect to a conference host and each other
through a web browser, Skype, Microsoft's Lync or other camera-enabled methods.
Aaron pointed to "three major strikes" against
traditional videoconferencing: the incompatibility of separate
videoconferencing systems, the cost and the complexity. "A typical
videoconferencing room system unit has more buttons on the remote control than
a typical human being can comprehend," Aaron said. "The average
person is intimidated by that, and they don't touch it. They call IT. If you
need to get IT involved in something, you're not going to do it frequently.
"We built the video equivalent of that
audioconferencing bridge," Aaron continued. "Our subscribers get a
virtual meeting room in our cloud, they can use any browser on any device to
schedule and join, and an email is sent to participants that says 'click this
link to join.' Whatever device or vendor, you can join the meeting in that
manner. We can bring together traditional Cisco or Polycom rooms or
telepresence suites with desktop and laptop and mobile devices running Skype,
Google, Lync or browsers, etc. "
Aaron cited Facebook, with 2,000 subscribers, as a key
commercial client. He said Blue Jeans has corporate clients of all sizes,
though its "sweet spot" is small and midsize companies "with a
few conference rooms with video systems, a distributed workforce, a progressive
IT organization and a younger workforce that has grown up in a video world, and
is looking to avoid travel or make traveling workers more productive on the
road."
About 35 percent of participants in Blue Jeans-enabled conferences
connect through browsers, Aaron said, while less than 20 percent use Skype.
Blue Jeans is sold on a monthly subscription basis, with per-minute, per-user
or average-use fees.
Blue Jeans "is already on the crest of the wave,
without any legacy technology to hold it back," wrote Telepresence and
Videoconferencing Insight Newsletter editor Keith Warburton in a January
report. "It has to be one of the major success stories of 2012, claiming
about 10 percent of the VC services market in little more than a year."
No company has more legacy videoconferencing technology than
Cisco and Polycom, which at the end of the third quarter of 2012 respectively
held 43.3 percent and 25 percent shares of the enterprise videoconferencing and
telepresence market, according to a November International Data Corp. report.
Though 2012 was not a great year for that end of the market—"mostly due to
uncertainty stemming from macroeconomic concerns and a continuing decline in
high-end immersive systems," wrote IDC senior analyst Rich Costello—both
companies have continued to diversify their video-collaboration offerings. For
example, Polycom in October unveiled a new suite of solutions that lets
customers "extend enterprise-grade video collaboration to users of Skype,
Facebook, Google Talk and other business video applications via a browser,"
according to the company. "We believe this launch of next-generation video
solutions will set a new industry standard for best user experience for both
end users and IT administrators, and will also provide a seamless and
extensible path for customers to fully video-enable their organizations,"
according to a statement from Polycom CEO Andy Miller.
Meanwhile, Vidyo, has pushed its architecture and the
quality of its video transmission for desktop videoconferences to gain a
foothold in the competitive market.
"You can say, 'Well, I've used Skype, and it's not
really good,' and that's true," Hollander said. "But what we're doing
is not Skype."
Vidyo works on "non-QOS networks, which means we work
on Wi-Fi, on 4G, on the general Internet from people's homes," Hollander
explained. "If you want a robust solution that's going to work on people's
personal devices, contact Vidyo. Now, Vidyo has room systems as well, but that's
how we get in [to corporate programs]. They already have Polycom or Cisco, and
they want to go to desktop. Yes, Cisco offers it. The multipoint infrastructure
of these legacy architecture systems is based on a [multipoint control unit].
This architecture is expensive. Vidyo has an architecture that does not
transcode, that does not need an MCU and is therefore much more affordable in
allowing for multipoint."
Instead of transcoding—"letting two or more video
streams into a single stream," Hollander said, which is "a very
negative process"—Vidyo uses what he called a multistream endpoint, which
allows "every endpoint to receive as many streams as participants they're
going to see on the screen."
About 65 percent of respondents in the BTN survey indicated that their organizations in the prior six
months had used desktop conferencing systems. By a wide margin, the most
frequently cited department involved in managing remote conferencing facilities
was IT (68 percent). Hollander said an organization's chief information officer
or IT director typically is involved when Vidyo sells to corporations.
Sabre Travel Network president Greg Webb said that his
company's efforts to introduce the new Sabre Virtual Meetings
videoconferencing distribution platform to corporate clients have necessitated
bringing together travel procurement and information technology executives.
"Over the last 10 years, tech has gotten more involved
in collaboration, meaning Outlook and Lotus Notes and things that have meeting
capabilities that are naturally embedded in people's calendars," Webb
said. "As we took the next step into videoconferencing, we had ROI and
purchase decisions being made inside the tech group by the CIO or people like
that. As we've gone into this process of tightly embedding the ability to have a
collaboration utility around videoconferencing that ties into the way you
manage your travel program, it's really brought two worlds together that don't
necessarily work together all the time. We've found we had to get the travel
procurement people and travel managers aligned with their CIO counterpart to
really get them to understand the power of what we were talking about. There
are still challenges."
Introduced last year, Sabre Virtual Meetings enables clients
to book their onsite videoconferencing rooms as well as about 4,000 public
rooms. Eight to 10 "fairly large, some extraordinarily large"
beta-test customers now are using the production version of the platform, Webb
said. Those companies, "heavily invested in their own units," Webb
said, typically have stuck to enabling bookings for their internal facilities.
"My guess," Webb said, "is that as we get
into nichier companies, you'll see more public room usage and probably more
partner usage."
This report
originally appeared in the March 4, 2013, issue of Business Travel News.