The View From Here: UC and Video Conferencing Demand Close Scrutiny
September 24, 2008
A couple of panels at the Interop industry conference last week in New York City demonstrated how broad two related categories — unified communications and video conferencing – have become. For this reason, it is important for IT departments and the sides of the business that will pay for and use these systems to agree precisely on what the company wants and to carefully plan every phase of procurement, deployment and management.
Robert Smithers, the CEO of test organization Miercom, presented test and performance results from a number of platforms (from 3Com, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, NEC and Siemens). All of the products performed well and offer various advantages. Underlying these findings is the more basic conclusion that unified communications is an increasingly broad category that covers a tremendous and expanding landscape. To some extent, the products perform many of the same basic functions. It is striking how differently the platforms are architected.
A larger panel led by Wainhouse Research Managing Partner Andrew Davis looked at video conferencing. The discussion was wide ranging, but the bottom line was similar: The category is broad and an organization that wants to employ the platforms has many key decisions to make. In this sector, the emergence of high definition monitors and telepresence are pushing it well beyond the rudimentary room and desktop PC systems that many traditionally associate with the category. How to integrate this newly expansive functionality into an organization – what to choose and what to bypass – is a vital question with which organization must grapple. To do so effectively requires input from the CIO, CEO and CFO – and users.
Both of these platforms offer opportunities and challenges for IT and business-oriented departments. Once deployed, UC systems will become increasingly central to the way in which organizations operate. They will take over existing tasks – for instance, phone communications will become an element of an overall UC infrastructure and video conferencing will replace some travel – and add new functions that employees likely will find valuable. Choosing the wrong system or falling short in the deployment and/or management phases will hurt the organization. The key, as always, is to communicate effectively.
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--Carl Weinschenk
Initially the concept of video conferencing was new to me but due to the change in technologies I felt that work and the performance of business can be effectively be increased positively due to the investment I made in more than one telepresence room. However, many telepresence solutions are now standards based, so they are compatible with other desktop.