Deepak Braganza Country Manager India & South Asia, LifeSize Communications, discussed trends in video conferencing and the boardroom with Mehak Chawla
How is the use of video evolving in India as devices converge?
Over the past half a decade, India has evolved into a key market for video in the APAC. One of the biggest reasons for that is the growing broadband industry, which has given us a huge boost in further penetrating into the enterprise and SMB segments. The other factor driving the adoption of video is mobility. With the launch of 3G services and mobile video, a lot of enterprises are looking to avail of video on smartphones and tablets. India is at the cusp of a revolution with technology platforms emerging to deliver high speed services. 4G is on the way and, with voice traffic stabilizing, data related services are becoming a core focus area for telecom service providers and that’s good news for video.
Are integration challenges playing spoilsport to the use of video on mobile platforms?
If you look at our strategy in terms of mobile, tablets and virtualization, our solutions are designed to seamlessly integrate with multiple environments. Today, we have over 30 devices that have been certified to run our software. Resolving the integration pain points is crucial to giving enterprises the flexibility that they seek, more so with BYOD becoming popular. BYOD restricts vendors from supporting operating systems in isolation. Mobility will push the video conferencing industry in India to deliver on-demand video.
Unified Communications (UC) is a catalyst in driving the adoption of mobility-based video. Indian enterprises are looking to mobilize their workforces and telecommuting or working from home could soon become part of the culture in India. Coupled with a spike in travel costs, this could give a substantial boost to video in India.
Video has been moving out of the conference room. Is that having an impact on the uptake of telepresence, which is highly equipment-centric?
Traditionally, video conferencing has been confined to the boardroom and to conferencing set-ups. As companies expand, they realize that setting up conference rooms across the country is not feasible. Enterprises are increasingly looking to provide video on a mass scale as in video for employees rather than just the top management.
On the other hand, telepresence has been declining for the past three quarters. The costs are prohibitive and the RoI has proved to be difficult to realize. There are some niche verticals that are employing this technology because of the nature of operations. Telepresence also restricts you to a specific location and a certain number of people. It defies the logic of video for the masses and, therefore, organizations are not seeing value in it.
Desktop conferencing is being touted as a game changer for video in India but we are not quite there yet.
According to Gartner, 200 million people across the world would be using desktop conferencing by 2015. Desktop conferencing in India, however, is yet to take off in a big way. Endpoint integration and webcam usage are some of the challenges that enterprise users face today, especially in verticals that are not particularly technology-savvy. Moreover, within the enterprise, there are plenty of IT restrictions when you come in from the Cloud onto an enterprise WAN and that is another hindrance to the adoption of video conferencing. Then there is the CAPEX issue. Companies increasingly want to take the OPEX route and that can result in lower bandwidth and service issues having an adverse effect on RoI.
Be it a piece of hardware for desktop conferencing or an app loaded on your laptop, enterprises are looking to provide video beyond conferencing rooms.
The government’s video frenzy is gradually cooling off. Will you focus on other verticals to compensate?
Most vendors have de-risked their revenue forecasts from the PSU and government sector because, over the course of the past year or so, the government has not delivered the numbers that the video vendors had foreseen. Therefore, over a period of time, we have also boosted our focus on verticals such as education, healthcare and the SMB sector. We intend to build products especially for SMBs since this segment has tremendous potential for video conferencing. In addition, since most enterprises have already bought the equipment for video conferencing, the SMB market is going to drive growth for video from an infrastructure perspective.
To this end, we recently announced our new platform Universal Video Collaboration (UVC) which is a virtualized infrastructure for video. It is an all-in-one box, much like converged infrastructure, that eliminates the need to have separate boxes for each video component. It is based on the principle of scale as you grow and is an apt solution for SMBs as well as enterprises.
The one thing that keeps us bullish about India is that a substantial majority of enterprises here expect video to become a regular practice at the workplace.
