Operators are finding that high-definition videoconferencing, including telepresence, is coming out of the boardroom and down to the desktop, shaking loose some serious business opportunities for managed services, often as part of a wider collaboration strategy. It’s a positive trend for carriers looking to broaden the stickiness of their offerings within the enterprise.
The major vendors got into the immersive space to replicate board meetings, but now there’s a trickle-down effect, as more types of video endpoints come online. That will penetrate further and further as mobility takes further hold, too. Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) is front of mind in many of the corporations.
“We see many customers that deploy a small number of the telepresence suites in select locations, deploy our LifeSize Room in large conference rooms around the world and enable offices and home office workers with either a LifeSize Passport or LifeSize Express system,” said Michael Helmbrecht, product management director at LifeSize Communications. “HD quality at the price/performance levels available today make it feasible for organizations to enable more sites.”
As a follow-on to that, the types of companies interested in immersive telepresence videoconferencing are not just the Fortune 100 set, by the way. “In terms of the market sweet spot, it’s difficult to pinpoint the sweet spot for telepresence as companies of all sizes and various vertical markets rely on telepresence for their business,” said Helmbrecht. “A very large growth opportunity exists in SMB; what the large enterprise customers have historically realized of the value of telepresence, small and medium businesses are readily adopting.”
Ultimately, players look forward to seeing further advancement toward anytime anywhere HD video. “Cisco has in mind this notion the ability to transcode and change codecs on the fly to run on any format depending on the device,” said Mark Weidick, vice president and general manager for the TelePresence Exchange Business Unit at Cisco Systems Inc.. “So we can broadcast on studio-quality HD and you’re on an iPhone and can receive that.”
Operators are getting the message: "We definitely believe in taking immersive down to the desktop and beyond, because it's a holistic solution space for a business," said Roberta McKinnon, director for unified communications and collaboration (UCC) global product marketing at Verizon Business, which created a product organization focusing on the overall video opportunity as a testament to its importance to the carrier.
And, it’s the growing complexity of corporate video needs that’s driving the service provider role in the ecosystem, to an extent. “This is not just telepresence at the high end, and not just for executives,” said Jeff Prestel, general manager of the video business unit at British Telecom Conferencing. “This is video delivered to the masses. Remember when PCs and distributed computing took off in the 90s-- the distributed environment is just so much more complex and it requires a provider to really manage that. The exact same thing happens here as video gets driven to the desktop.”
