AV Conferencing finding massive deployments

The audio-video conferencing segment revenue rose by 15.2% during FY 2009-10.
The segment grew to Rs 265 crore from Rs 230 crore. Polycom retained its top
position with a revenue of Rs 110 crore, registering a growth of 10%. Tandberg,
which has got some major deals from the government verticals, grew by 25%. All
key players in this segment showed double digit growth. Factors such as
increasing competition from open source audio and web conferencing technologies,
high pricing pressure and need for high infrastructure sophistication are
limiting the growth.

Increased collaboration has become the key to successful businesses in
today's globalized world. With 60% of communications being non-verbal, and 30%
of the brain's cortex being devoted to vision, 8% on touch, and 3% on
hearing-rich media that allows the use of all these senses would assume great
significance.

Business conferences and decision making options depend critically upon the
availability of information at the right time. In order to save time, business
meetings are increasingly being conducted over telecommunication networks with
the help of videoconferencing. The drivers for this industry are many: declining
costs of IP telephony, availability of broadband at low prices, and the need of
enterprises to cut costs. Many other factors have combined to ensure the success
of audio-video conferencing in India.

New Innovations

Cisco recently acquired Tandberg and they will together provide customers
with a complete portfolio of endpoints, infrastructure and telepresence cloud
services. Together, Cisco and Tandberg are looking forward to capture the
collaboration market. The integration of the Tandberg portfolio with the
existing Cisco TelePresence portfolio is aimed at giving customers access to a
broader product choice and an integrated Cisco TelePresence architecture for
many solutions, and rich end user experiences. With Tandberg products and
technologies, Cisco will be offering an interoperable portfolio for face-to-face
collaboration. The portfolio consists of three integrated product categories:
endpoints, infrastructure and telepresence cloud services (including
intercompany).

Polycom announced H.264 high profile support to reduce the bandwidth
requirement for high definition (HD) telepresence and standard definition (SD)
videoconferencing by as much as 50%. This gives customers the best video
experience in the industry at half the network bandwidth requirements of
competing solutions, a substantial benefit that will drive wider adoption and
greater return on investment.

Polycom has also launched Polycom Touch Control that allows users to control
all aspects of their experience using a touch screen. Very recently, Polycom, in
partnership with Reliance Communications, also introduced the world's first
wireless, high resolution videoconferencing service. Polycom's new Architectured
Telepresence Experience High Definition 300 (Polycom ATX 300) allows meeting
spaces, furniture, displays, and decor to be customized for unique use models
and environmental requirements.

Actis Technologies, launched a complete 3D telepresence experience center in
India and has plans to open more such centers across India. LifeSize has high
definition video communication solutions, with more than 9,000 videoconferencing
customers across 80 countries-large enterprises through SMBs. Public healthcare,
education, enterprise and government are some of the verticals that LifeSize has
a prominent presence in.

Significant Trends

Rich media conferencing is a powerful tool that a company can use to achieve
effective interactive collaboration. An enterprise can invite a specialist or a
subject matter expert to a virtual meeting on short notice, regardless of the
person's geographic location. Sales representatives can offer more engaging
online presentations and demonstrations, complete with video footage and actual
demonstrations of the applications or services that they promote. While large
enterprises can adopt a full suite of applications, SMBs can take advantage of
the specific features that match their needs and budgets.

High definition videoconferencing is in vogue. It is fast becoming the most
ubiquitous form of video communication. A marked increase in the adoption of
HVDC is seen across segments like IT/BPO and healthcare. Gone are the days of
extended travel, waiting in long airport security lines, travel delays, inflated
travel budgets and lost productivity. As organizations become more diverse in
business applications, acquisitions and mergers become more common and
multi-national work forces become the standard, decision makers are looking for
ways to make communicating among their knowledge workers easy.

With the emergence of the Internet and the evolution of network centric
business practices, many companies turned immediately to multimedia
conferencing; others embraced applications that allow groups to share documents
and collaborate on projects in real time. Now some companies, including a
growing number of SMBs, are also efficiently combining these capabilities to
create virtual meetings and work faster and more effectively.

Challenges

Although the growth curve for audio-videoconferencing is expanding daily,
there are still a number of hurdles that are to be overcome. Pricing still
remains a major issue as most conferencing deployments are quite expensive. Even
though prices have been slashed globally for SMBs to adopt this solution, prices
are still an issue. Consistency of bandwidth is another issue. Reliable
bandwidth is of prime importance for an immersive experience. Need for real-time
applications is the need of the hour for managing the converged infrastructure.

With the idea of 'working from home' gaining popularity, the deployment of
audio-video conferencing solutions is on the rise. A general consensus is that
the Indian domestic market presents a huge opportunity for the networking
sector.

Archana Singh

archanasi@cybermedia.co.in