Video conferencing in enterprises is the norm today. What’s interesting is how vendors are innovating to make it more collaborative, interactive and integrated in the era of convergence. By Mehak Chawla
With the widening availability of bandwidth and its plummeting cost, one of the most tedious impediments that stood in the way of video conferencing has nearly been overcome. Couple the bandwidth boom with a recession and you have a win-win situation for video conferencing. It was during the slowdown that video conferencing gathered steam as companies sought to rein in their travel budgets.
According to industry estimates the overall video conferencing market in India hovers around Rs 400 crores as of now. Out of this, close to Rs 60 crores is the services pie and the rest is the hardware part (end points and bridges). While the hardware part is growing at close to 20%, the services market has been registering a growth of 13-15%.
A lot of this growth can be attributed to two major factors namely the green drive that has caught the fancy of enterprises across the globe and the economic slowdown. Although its passé to say that the use of video conferencing results in a definitive increase in employees’ efficiency, the bottom line is that saving travel costs, especially on international travel has been the ruling logic behind video conferencing deployments. The third saving grace of video conferencing in India has come in from an unexpected quarter—the government. In the last couple of years, when the enterprises capped their CAPEX, it was the government that came to the rescue of video conferencing, buying both the hardware as well as services in substantial quantities.
According to research conducted by Cable&Wireless Worldwide, Indians are the most bullish on the prospects of video conferencing becoming a ‘way of doing everyday business’ with over 70% saying that it would become a regular practice at the workplace this year.
With awareness becoming widespread, vendors have their tasks culled out for them. Not only do they have to live up to the market expectations, they also have to bring fresh innovations to the table in order to sustain and survive.
Even with the progressive maturity curve of video conferencing, there are aspects that need to be probed and issues that demand attention.
The changing face of video
It is the era of second generation conferencing where video has moved far beyond enterprise usage.
The Chief Minister of Gujarat addresses directly the grievances of citizens once every month. On that day, the Secretariat level, District level and Sub-District level officers are all inter-connected. And its all through video conferencing. The e-governance program has been baptized SWAGAT (State Wide Attention on Grievances through Application of Technology) and is dependent almost solely on video for its operations.
There are other innovative uses that video has been put through. Be it prisoner trials or managing ATM’s remotely, video has marked its presence beyond the boardroom. Saurabh Sanghoee, Head of Global Services, Orange Business Services, India, said, “An interesting vertical where this technology is gaining ground is the Government-to-Consumer domain. This is bringing greater efficiency, transparency and accountability for the administration. Even departments such as jails, courts and schools are switching over to video conferencing facilities. Recently, HD video conferencing is being opted across district courts.”
The next-gen technologies are a part of this new face of conferencing. Now that video is an established part of any serious unified communications’ strategy, integration and collaboration are being given a lot of limelight. There are other technologies that have silently ushered in growth for video. According to Parminder Saini, Industry Manager, ICT Practice,Frost & Sullivan,South Asia & Middle East, “The video conferencing hardware market has witnessed significant adoption in 2011 primarily backed by advances in video compression technologies like H 264 that assure utilization of low bandwidth for running video sessions.”
Other than these, there has been another significant technological progression, which is fast becoming an industry buzzword namely telepresence.
| Factors impeding the growth of video conferencing in India |
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Real-life, almost
Although telepresence saw limited adoption, mostly at the top of the pyramid, it has managed to ignite a lot of enthusiasm around. It also marked a definite shift in the video conferencing market. Thanks to the advent of telepresence, enterprises are demanding more from their video conferencing equipment. The other wave that telepresence has brought about is that enterprises that have deployed these solutions tend to use them extensively and more often than traditional video conferencing in order to justify the high costs.
Cost indeed has been the biggest hurdle in the growth path of telepresence. Though the superior experience that telepresence provides is accepted, the CAPEX involved has ensured that the technology remains restricted to the top rung of the ladder. Detailed Sanghoee, “We are seeing a lot of enthusiasm from customers who were earlier putting off plans for telepresence deployment during the economic slump. Customers realize that telepresence is not cheap to deploy. However, increasingly we see more customers are realizing the value and long term economy in telepresence deployment.”
The numbers globally are also speaking up for the popularity of telepresence. Telepresence has witnessed extensive growth in the last few years and is expected to reach $4.3 billion by 2014 by market estimates.
Sanghoee gave some insight as to how fast telepresence is growing in India. “At Orange, we have already seen a 130% increase in sales of telepresence rooms over the past 12 months.,” he said.
Gopi Gopinath, President and COO, Enterprise Business, Reliance Globalcom opined, “Telepresence is setting a high benchmark for video experience and is being demanded even over Public IP networks and lower end devices such as tablets and PCs too.”
Renting telepresence rooms is also becoming a popular phenomenon. However, in spite of loud claims coming from some parts of the industry about telepresence wiping the traditional video conferencing out of the canvas, the experts say there is room for both to co-exist in harmony.
The ambitious price tag that telepresence comes with is the driving force behind this assumption. The CAPEX and OPEX incurred for telepresence makes it difficult to justify expenses purely on RoI terms. If the cost of conferencing is higher than travel cost, then it does not stand to serve its primary purpose. Hence for a reasonable ROI, telepresence rooms should have an utilization of six hours a day and that too not for international conferences. The other big issue is the restrictive nature of telepresence, given the fact that it can’t move beyond the boardroom. Nevertheless, telepresence is expected to continue to cater to a niche, high-end, top-of-the line segment of the market., but it certainly won’t replace video conferencing.
Gopinath was of the view that the higher the proliferation of video conferencing, the more it would drive the demand for an ever improving experience. Hence, frequent and mature end users will demand better experiences that only telepresence would be able to deliver. Also, the same telepresence user, when on the move, would not mind using a tablet or desktop for video conferencing.
Saini summed up by explaining that both the technologies would continue to generate demand, albeit from different segments of the market. “The telepresence market has also witnessed decent demand in the government and a few other enterprises in the corporate segment but not to an extent to wipe out the demand for traditional video conferencing. The video conferencing systems are definitely here to stay to cater to the mid-sized enterprises and telepresence is still reserved for the elite segment of enterprises.”
Beyond the conference room
A couple of years back, video conferencing was tied to the network and the end point equipment. An enterprise deploying a video solution had to have these prerequisites—a dedicated network to conduct video on and hardware as per its requirements.
The last year was the year of applications and convergence for video conferencing. While it’s been a couple of years since video has become an integral piece of the unified communication strategy, it saw an even deeper penetration in the enterprise last year.
Both the vendors as well as the enterprises were quick to realize that if video has to percolate beyond the boardroom then the device barrier needs to be overcome.
As Anil Chawla, Director Sales – Enterprise & Public Sector, Avaya India, observed, “You can no longer bind the user experience to the conference room. That’s how consumerization in the form of BYOD is happening.”
One of the key factors responsible for this change is the growing penetration of smartphones and data devices into an organizations’ network and the sort of services that the executives are demanding on their devices. Owing to the multiplicity of devices, video is now also becoming, or has embarked on the journey to become network-agnostic. With the advent of 3G, video conferencing is moving to the mobile network in a big way. Thin client video conferencing applications are also facilitating video over Wi-Fi.
Customer demands are also portraying the same trend. Sanghoee said, “Customers have also been looking for a solution, which does not lock them with one network only and they can make their video presence interoperable across networks.”
As a reaction to this evolution, vendors are also beefing up their offerings in order to make video more interactive and collaborative in nature. Orange Business Services recently launched Open Videopresence. This is an open video conferencing service, regardless of the network (IP,VPN, Internet, ISDN), vendor or equipment. Polycom’s acquisition of ViVu, a provider of software for embedding video conferencing in Web sites is also a step in this direction.
Even as there is large scale convergence happening to give video more coverage, the networks are also evolving in order to make video a seamless experience. Enterprises are moving from legacy ISDN to IP. Customers on public IP are realizing the risks of security and are migrating to Managed IP networks for video conferencing. Organizations like Cisco and Polycom are promoting B2B exchange networks such as Telepresence Exchange Network (TEN) and Open Visual Collaboration Consortium (OVCC) to overcome the islands of communications.
Gopinath summed it up saying, “From being an intra-enterprise (mainly point to point) visual communication channel, video conferencing is rapidly moving towards a platform, location, device and network agnostic, multi-party visual collaboration channel. Service providers are making this possible by extending managed services to enterprises.”
Managed services has long been touted as the anecdote that will take video to the lower end of the pyramid. With the Cloud coming into the picture, the proposition appears to be more viable than ever. If there is anything that stands in the path of video now, these are, what we can safely call, technical glitches.
Labor of integration
Video has, since some time been a piece of the unified communication set-up. So the integration challenge is not new to video conferencing. If anything, it is even more daunting today. As is clear that video is no longer married to a device or a network or even to an organization, the integration and interoperability challenges are surfacing more than ever.
These challenges did exist even when video conferencing thrived in its traditional avatar, so its anyone’s guess that with next-gen conferencing, there will be next-gen challenges too. Pointed out Gill, “One of the challenges in the widespread adoption of these video solutions is the lack of interoperability between different platforms and no vendor being able to offer the complete solution.”
CIOs are increasingly looking for solutions that are interoperable and work seamlessly with each other. Platforms with an open collaboration platform that can work with different types of devices from different vendors bringing them together, is the need of the hour. Although such platforms to collaborate seamlessly are available today, general skepticism and fear of tampering with an installed solution has refrained the Indian enterprises from experimenting.
There are other issues saddling the Indian video conferencing market. Reliability, ease of use, manual booking and availability of video conferencing rooms which are often meeting cum conference rooms, availability of bridging ports, firewall restriction for use of desktop video conferencing, MIS and reporting on usage, ROI Management, continued use of old ISDN-based legacy networks, are some of the issues that CIOs are grappling with when planning their unified communications strategy.
Minhaj Zia, Director, Collaboration, Cisco India & SAARC, elaborated upon the network challenges that are plaguing the video market. “Traditional IP networks are not well-equipped to deal with interactive and real-time requirements of video, making delivery and quality of media unpredictable and increasing complexity for network operators and managers. Hence, traditional IP networks need to evolve to accommodate these changes and customers need to take a comprehensive, architectural approach to their video strategy.”
The shining side of the coin is that there are already solutions available in the market to address these issues. Explained Zia, “Interoperability is critical to increase video adoption across organizations and Cisco is delivering enhancements to the existing product line that allow it to support interoperability. Following the acquisition of Tandberg, we created an open architecture that provides greater interoperability with Tandberg and third-party systems.”
The integration challenges, however are expected to be sorted out once the islands of connectivity across service providers are connected. The initiative to launch Unified Communication Inter-Operability Forum is a testament to the fact that the enterprises can communicate with each other irrespective of the platforms used.
| The evolution of video conferencing |
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From a trend to a norm
Conferencing has become more of a norm in the Indian marketplace now. What is happening is the penetration of video to other devices like mobiles, tablets and laptops, a trend that is only going to accelerate in the coming year. Something of a similar nature is likely to happen to telepresence also which is expected to move beyond boardrooms, and go beyond the large enterprises to mid-sized companies.
The growth too is here to stay for video conferencing. According to a recent Gartner report, there will be more than 200 million people worldwide who will run corporate-supplied video conferencing from their desktops by 2015.
Desktop video conferencing in India, however, is yet to take off. Download and installation of desktops based software end points and integration with the Web cam and microphone is the first barrier. The second challenge is high quality Internet bandwidth on the Enterprise LAN, which is always restricted. Then comes the opening of firewall ports which is another big challenge.
Though desktop conferencing might come of age as solutions emerge around these challenges, as of now, video conferencing has enough management and convergence challenges to be dealt with.
mehak.chawla@expressindia.com