The future of videoconferencing

Cisco spent the latter quarter of 2009 attempting to purchase videoconferencing vendor Tandberg. And in December, Cisco got its wish: the networking giant took hold of more than 90% of Tandberg’s shares, allowing it to move ahead with the acquisition. The move had pundits atwitter, with many seeing it as an indicator of further action in the videoconferencing space.

Joseph Sweeney, analyst at Australian firm IBRS, reckons Cisco's acquisition of Tandberg will help Cisco take high-quality, 'concierge-style' videoconferencing down into the mid-levels of the enterprise. Overall, Sweeney says this will be a positive move, as it will open up better technologies to more companies.

However, he worries that Cisco’s history with proprietary communications protocols could hamper the future openness of Tandberg, a company which traditionally embraced open standards.

“One of the real dangers that we're facing in any communications technology is when you see an increasing dominance of proprietary systems. I think that it'll eventually reverse itself, but it in the short term that's what worries me,” Sweeney says.

Optus Business, which offers Cisco Telepresence systems direct to customers, and Tandberg products through its partners, sees a similar outcome as far as product ranges go.

Scott Mason, Director, Strategy and Fixed Marketing at the company, says: “It provides Cisco with some lower end systems, and plus it takes a competitor out of the market.”

And there could be more market consolidation to follow, according to Mason, with more large vendors snapping up other smaller vendors. At the same time, customer interest in videoconferencing will grow, and vendors will look to fill out their ranges of videoconferencing products, in order to thrive in an increasingly competitive market.

All these factors will lead up to a reconsideration of sales models.

“I think the vendors will really look at their channel models. A lot of them will really be looking at the way they go to market. Most of them currently have a mixture of direct sales, channel and wholesale type arrangements,” Mason says.

“I’m not saying that model will change, but I think they will be having a harder look at it. Do they expand their channels? Or do they back a few up? There’ll be some strategising around what they do there,” he says.

Overall, Mason believes the recent growth of videoconferencing will continue.

“Desktop and smaller end systems will become more cost effective and more accepted. I think you’ll see it’s not a trend that’s going to go away. It’s going to continue to accelerate and become more popular,” he says.

“You’ll continue seeing a bigger deployment of videoconferencing across all levels of the organisation.”

But that growth will bring some deep-seated issues in videoconferencing to light, namely, interoperability. Right now, some vendors use their own proprietary communication protocols, making it difficult to get products from different manufacturers to talk to one another. As videoconferencing grows, this problem will become increasingly common, forcing vendors to rethink proprietary systems.

“I think that all of the vendors will look at how they can interoperate with their competitors more effectively,” he says.

Sweeney expects that the main supposed driver of videoconferencing will be carbon footprint. But in reality, this might not end up being that big a motivating force for many companies, since it’s hard to demonstrate how videoconferencing actually reduces carbon footprint.

“Whether that’s true or not - whether you can actually show a reduced carbon footprint from video comms - I would question. It comes down to that issue of analysing what you’re actually doing,” he says.

IBRS encourages interested organisations to try and pin down exactly which types of meetings their employees want to avoid.

“Don’t ask them about the technology,” Sweeney says. “Just say: How do you meet? How often do you meet? What do you talk about? What documents do you exchange when you meet? And given a clean slate, with unlimited budget, what would you like to be able to do?”

You’ll quickly find out the types of meetings your employees could avoid. These could include high-level executive meetings, mid-level management meetings, or low-level collaboration meetings. Based on these findings, you can decide which, if any, videoconferencing technology suits you best.

Despite any difficulties involved in proving the technology’s worth, videoconferencing adoption will grow in the next year, Sweeney says. Government departments will deploy the technology, as will many education institutions, particularly secondary schools and universities.

“As part of the digital education revolution, we’re seeing some fairly large-scale investments in videocomms,” he says.

Across NSW and Victoria, a number of Catholic and private schools have already implemented videoconferencing systems. Interestingly, while the technology does allow students to communicate with other classrooms, its primary use in these situations is to help teachers collaborate: share lessons plans, address outcomes and so on.

Looking further into the future, Sweeney says the technology will increasingly be viewed in the context of unified communications and collaboration plans. So rather than deploying large comprehensive systems, organisations will look at their very specific communication needs, and insert videoconferencing where appropriate.

“We’re going to see a lot more small tactical thinking. But at the same time, video will increasingly be viewed through more of a strategic, unified comms/collaboration space. But it’s going to take a good three years to work through that yet, before we start talking about videocomms in its own right again,” he says.

*Andrew Collins is a freelance writer.