Real-time Collaboration Drives Conferencing

In today's intricately networked and globalized economy, efficient and meaningful collaboration among colleagues, customers, partners, and suppliers, is a business imperative. Customers need to stay nimble and flexible to maintain market share, navigate difficult business conditions, and explore new opportunities. There is a growing need to bring people and information together to reduce decision times and accelerate innovation. And this all needs to be done across organizational areas, supply chains, and geographic regions. Better collaboration means faster decision making and time to market, improved customer intimacy, and richer cross-cultural communications.

The market is gaining hugely from organizations' austerity drive which includes enhanced collaboration and reduction in travel costs. A conferencing solution allows organizations to bring key people together that are geographically dispersed into a single conference, to facilitate discussions, ideas, and decision making. This helps reduce the time and cost associated with traveling.

As per Frost and Sullivan, the web conferencing markets in Asia Pacific have seen a sustained demand in 2009 and 2010 from both emerging and mature economies. Growth of the sector, which includes hosted services/SaaS and on-premise web conferencing software, is expected to continue rising as it has over the past couple of years. A study by Frost and Sullivan found that the market-covering 13 Asia-Pacific countries-earned revenues of $97.4 mn in 2008 and estimates this to reach $91.8 mn by end of 2014, at a CAGR of 26.1% (2009-2014).

Tech Revolution

The availability of 3G definitely opens up new roads for technologies and applications owing to the greater bandwidth available as well as faster data transfer. As data becomes more pervasive, privacy and security are two important concerns to be tackled efficiently on a worldwide basis.

In India, setting up infrastructure which can penetrate the rural areas is difficult due to the vast landscape hence the technologies being deployed are mostly available only in the metros. With the advent of 3G, individuals will expect to be able to cross boundaries without interference in connectivity. As real-time transfers will become synonymous with 3G applications, the network infrastructure required to support these apps should provide seamless transitions.

A recent study conducted by Cisco predicts that by 2015, more than 5.6 bn personal devices will be connected to mobile networks, and there will also be 1.5 bn machine-to-machine nodes, nearly the equivalent of one mobile connection for every person in the world. Mobile video is forecast to represent 66% of all mobile data traffic by 2015, increasing 35 fold from 2010 till 2015, the highest growth rate of any mobile data application tracked in the Cisco VNI Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast . This traffic increase represents a CAGR of 92% over the same period. Two major global trends are driving these significant mobile data traffic increases-a continued surge in mobile-ready devices such as tablets and smart phones, and widespread mobile video content consumption.

The necessity of becoming mobile is the need of the hour for an organization's sustainability. Precedence is given to 3G services as it provides an improved bandwidth and allows for faster data transfer. As is the case with all new technologies, 3G too will bring with it a whole new set of opportunities as well as challenges that will indeed see new technological developments arise. As a networking leader, we believe that 3G will bring better cost efficiencies and a chance to collaborate across regions, teams, and geographies seamlessly.

Bandwidth Availability

With broadband fast becoming pervasive in India and looking ahead, IP based networks will play a critical role in advancing the broadband penetration in the country. Bandwidth availability and the price of bandwidth will also be driving adoption of videoconferencing. India is a growing economy and there is immense competition among companies-pressure to be more productive at lower costs, short time to market and being able to reach people are pertinent to gain competitive edge, and these requirements are driving adoption of videoconferencing in the country.

The biggest growth driver of this industry is the mission critical need for enterprises to become nimble and agile to outpace the competition in today's fast changing and ultra-competitive business environment.

Eco-friendly Conferencing

Green has achieved different dimensions in last few years. Enterprises are also adopting conferencing to assert themselves as pro-environment friendly companies.

Two years after implementing its own telepresence private rooms, Tata Communications saw executive travel reduce by 39%. In sectors where telepresence was an option, carbon emissions from air travel were reduced by 39%, compared to only 4% on sectors where telepresence was not available

Companies like Infosys have also launched incentives to encourage car pooling and use of video conferencing, telepresence and online meetings to reduce business travel.

Reducing carbon footprint has been one of the top agenda of the companies that are increasingly going for conferencing solutions

Telepresence in Demand

The public telepresence rooms in India really do get enterprises excited, since it is the lowest cost, charge by the hour way to access telepresence, and because it allows people to connect with organizations in places where they may not have a permanent room. That makes it a great way to get started, or to extend the reach of a network you may have already built out.

Telepresence systems come in a wide range of fit-outs, supporting a diverse set of customer requirements and provide an experience level not found in traditional videoconferencing products in the market. In addition, an integration of cost-effective high definition solutions, a variety of video endpoints can participate in a telepresence conference providing a wide range of cost options along with a high degree of interoperability. While telepresence might not be immediately relevant for SMBs in India, it will gain importance as their businesses grow and the travel needs of such businesses increase. Telepresence will allow businesses to reduce their travel expenditure, limiting it to the final handshake.

Telepresence provides life-like, high definition, conferencing facilities with superior audio, video, and environmental qualities allowing participants to meet their colleagues, customers, and business partners across a virtual table. Participants in telepresence meetings will feel that they are in the same room together regardless of where they are individually located in the world. This creates the potential to improve all sorts of business interaction through better and more frequent meetings, resulting in stronger customer relationships and accelerated sales cycles, better project management and tighter integration of remote offices.

Businesses can now improve long-distance collaboration and decision making to accelerate productivity with less physical travel while achieving substantial cost savings, and at the same time reducing their carbon footprint.

Ensuring Presence

The public room facility offers users who do not have telepresence rooms within their company, access to this cutting-edge technology at an affordable hourly rate.Tata Communications currently has the largest global network of public telepresence rooms-32 public rooms in 21 major cities across 5 continents covering the USA, Canada, UK, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Kuwait, South Africa, India, Philippines, Singapore, and Australia

Telepresence encourages businesses to cross borders and interact at a personalized level. Use of video has percolated across the rank and file of companies. Cisco was able to bring down travel expenses from approximately $750 mn a year to $200 mn, and an average of 8,000 TP meetings a week-this was even before the acquisition of Tandberg. Cisco has 984 Cisco-on-Cisco telepresence rooms internally with 252 private rooms. Before bringing Tandberg on board, Cisco has estimated nearly 8,000 telepresence meetings. Needless to say, these numbers have only increased in the recent past. Cisco's partnership with Tandberg now offers the industry's most comprehensive and interoperable telepresence portfolio and an integrated architecture for face-to-face communication. The deployment of these solutions is moving beyond corporates to the government sector, judiciary, distance learning, entertainment and telemedicine. There is an increased use of high definition videoconferencing systems for interviewing candidates, interaction with relatives settled abroad, reviews and meetings, product launches, press conferences and auditioning actors. Video is as ushering in a new future for companies where organizations will move from a command and control model to a collaboration model.

Polycom Immersive Telepresence Solutions offer the most life-like meeting experiences and broadest portfolio of options to meet any customer requirement. Hosting up to 28 people per site, Polycom solutions enable incredibly productive collaboration sessions for all groups and needs. Built on open standard designs, Polycom Immersive Telepresence Solutions natively interoperate with standards based video systems to fully leverage the existing high definition and legacy video investments.

The public telepresence rooms in India really do get people excited, since it is the lowest cost, charge by the hour way to access Telepresence, and because it allows people to connect with organizations in places where they may not have a permanent room. That makes it a great way to get started, or to extend the reach of a network you may have already built out.

Trends

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 had turned to multimedia conferencing, others embraced applications that allowed groups to share documents and collaborate on projects in real-time. Now some companies, including a growing number of SMBs are combining these capabilities to create virtual meetings and work faster and more effectively.

Cisco forecasts the emergence of video to be a market changing trend which is growing exponentially. Currently we are at the tipping point of the market transition around video, where fundamental business models are being built around these new video enabled endpoints.

Prospects

Technologies will constantly keep evolving to meet the changing requirements of businesses. Cisco, a global leader in conferencing solutions, has been a key player in transforming the technologies being currently deployed. This change has been accelerated by the launch of high-end video collaboration solutions such as telepresence.

As per the Frost and Sullivan report, telepresence and WebEx solutions are mainly being used for corporate meetings and recruitment by HR executives. As the technology gains momentum, other applications such as training and research, and the demonstration of products and services shall increase the adoption of these solutions in the next 3-5 years.

Business in India is expanding at a tremendous rate-enhancing the productivity and justifying the RoI has become the most important criteria for the decision makers in the company. To stay connected with the geographically diversified workforce and reaching highest level of corporate success in this competitive era, the CEOs and CTOs of the company are moving towards the deployment of the unified communication solutions. This demand for the videoconferencing gave boom to the UC market in India. During 2009, the market growth had been excellent for videoconferencing market in India.

Videoconferencing traditionally has been the forte of the big enterprises. But now the government, healthcare, education and other service industries are rapidly adopting the services. Government is one of the most important and large adopter of the UC solutions. Another trend that is coming up in the UC market is the small and medium sized enterprises. Participants in the UC market are providing the customers new ranges and diversified offerings on UC, which helps the SMEs stay in competition with the bigger enterprises.

Bound to Grow

According to Frost & Sullivan report, by 2015 this industry is expected to reach around $850-900 mn and the growth is expected to be 15%. According to Frost & Sullivan survey, videoconferencing is expected to grow at a CAGR of 24.9% till 2011.

Moreover increased collaboration has become the key to successful businesses in today's globalized world. With 60% of communication 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. Cisco telepresence offers an ultra high definition, spatial audio, real-time, in-person experience. The Cisco telepresence meeting solution is a natural extension of the broader Cisco unified communications collaboration portfolio, because it is meant for geographically dispersed organizations looking for ways to communicate and collaborate better and be closer to co-workers, partners, and customers in remote locations. The introduction of desktop telepresence has also seen a lot of traction in the market as it blends top-of the-line solutions with the desktop in order to create a more personalized user experience. We see a lot of excitement in the market around telepresence.

Archana Singh
archanasi@cybermedia.co.in