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In making new markets, it's never been enough that a new technology is cool or even that it's workable or reliable. Especially in a tight economy, new capabilities also must provide measurable impact on the top line, bottom line or both. And it doesn't hurt if new service-enabling platforms require no extensive integration of piece parts and no lengthy implementation engagements.
With those requirements in mind, corporate video streaming and conferencing technology vendors have begun to sing similar refrains about centralized, end-to-end management, turnkey implementations and "monetization" tools designed to document the cost, performance and new revenue generated by their platforms.
In late April, large-scale streaming media management platform provider Surgient Networks Inc. announced a pay-as-you-grow pricing scheme and new "e-Utility" metering tools. In early May, enScaler Inc. cut its entry-level pricing from $500,000 to $5,000, while it added self-scheduling and usage monitoring applications to its quiver, by acquiring Lariat Software Inc. A week later, networked IP video solutions provider VCON Telecommunications Ltd. partnered with videoconferencing-to-streaming media gateway maker STARBAK Communications to enable ad hoc streaming and storage of videoconferences, as well as usage metering and mediation of such services. At the same time, unified collaboration services provider V-SPAN Inc. announced large-scale wins for its any network, any hardware, any location Videoconferencing Network Management Service.
In the words of Lariat Software president Andrew Fry: "The corrections of the last few quarters have winnowed the industry to solution and service providers that deliver scalable applications and services, measurable value, clear monetization and a return on investment that is both benefit-driven and revenue-driven."
Lariat's new parent enScaler has sought to address scale, cost savings and what CEO Deepak Srinivasan calls a "severely broken supply chain" by pre-integrating and automating disparate functions -- multi-format media encoding, distributed database management, digital rights management, subscriber and access control management.
But it is the integration of subscriber and content management that turns monetization capability up a notch, says Srinivasan. "We enable access providers to apply subscriber management to offer monetization to content providers -- certainty that my new content release is going to this paying customer," he says. "Why would a top cable operator not go to a studio and say, 'Here's a way I can authenticate down to the user, and you're going to get your cut.' Both the broadband consumer and enterprise opportunities are huge."
Focused heavily on Fortune 500 customers, Surgient also is pitching a scalability and monetization story, saying its integration of storage, computing and networking into one unified pool of managed assets can result in up to 90 percent total cost of ownership savings. But its emphasis is on the new revenue side by enabling the service provider or corporation to identify premium content and to set policies that favor customers willing to pay a premium price for it.
"When demand spikes hit us and our box maxes out, overload protection policies defined by service provider can deny access, throttle back bandwidth or tier access for higher paying customers or for priority content," says Surgient president and CEO Nagi Rao. "It becomes comparable to yield management in the airline industry, where seat sales and pricing may be based on a range of parameters that drive top-line revenue."
Those parameters might include a direct link to infrastructure resource usage. "We can price for all the pieces we monitor and log, including bandwidth, input/output, processor, memory and how much disk space you use -- all logged without a hit on performance, compared to a 50- to 60-percent degradation on a standard server," Rao says. "That equals utility pricing. How you bill each piece is up to you, Mr. Service Provider."
From the corporate customer's point of view, whether video applications reside on premises or out in the service provider cloud, they are a threat to LAN resource management. For that reason, vendors like VCON -- one of whose primary goals is to extend the footprint of video availability -- are comparing their wares to enterprise PBX systems.
VCON president Gordon Daughtery likens his Media xchange Manager to an "IP video PBX with central management and administration and an always growing suite of applications. We provide tools to add applications, assign features, track call records, create hunt groups, set per-user bandwidth allocation or per-user quality of service levels."
Daugherty says although overall videoconferencing revenue is flat, the conference room and desktop system pricing has plummeted, "so I'm more interested in extending the reach and availability of content that has been limited to a small community of executive management users." This expansion of potential eyeballs naturally will lead to creation of time-saving and revenue-enhancing services, such as video mail among project team members; a video call center kiosk in a bank branch that lacks an on-site auto loan expert; or on-demand streaming of stored company videoconferences that have e-learning value to lower management, he adds.
To similarly ease service creation, enScaler has partnered with Accordent Technologies Inc. to provide simple tools for the publishing of video content from any qualified desktop to the streaming network.
