Tandberg puts video conferencing on Web diet

For years, all the bounties video conferencing promised by cutting business travel - saving the Earth from nasty carbon emissions, delivering work-life balance to beleaguered workers, and saving everyone the fuss and bother of attending Dilbertesque business meetings in person - floundered on quality issues. Now, one vendor is using the power of the Web to address the problem.For some the technology's troubles are endemic, particularly regarding PC-based video conferencing. It "often looks like you're watching a badly-dubbed foreign movie," says Melanie Turek, principal analyst at global growth consultancy Frost & Sullivan. "It's very important that the sound and image match up, and it's still a problem with many of these technologies."Numerous factors need to congeal to establish quality video conferencing for the business masses. On the enterprise side, many infrastructure requirements - reliable high-speed Web connections, big bandwidth, and processor-powerful PCs equipped with speakers and webcams - have only recently become standard.On the vendor side, New York-based Tandberg Inc. believes it has all the problems at that end licked with its new wireless Movi system.The main stumbling blocks to widespread adoption of PC-based video conferencing have been the ability to manage large deployments, enforce network controls and a lack of interoperability with other systems, says Peter Nutley, director of product marketing at Tandberg's Reston VA office. "Competitors require software installations on each PC, and this can be a nightmare for IT departments - if you want to enable 5,000 PCs, you must touch and support them all," he says.Bigger nightmareAn even bigger nightmare is the potential for system meltdown if bandwidth-hogging video applications interfere with mission-critical email or other applications. "In a client-based design, there's no network mechanism to say you can only call at a certain maximum speed, and this can bring the network to its knees."Describing it as the first of its kind, he says Tandberg's Movi system is a network appliance. It has a fat server that enforces network rules and a wafer-thin client that requires no installation. Web links are sent to users, which direct their PCs to the Movi server to download applications into the browser to handle video compression and other functions.Turek agrees Movi is unique, pointing out many vendors with thick clients say there isn't as much room for feature functionality with the skinny Web approach. But this is a non-issue. "You do lose some bells and whistles, but for many users it doesn't matter as they don't want the extra features," she says.The one feature teleworkers and road warriors want the most is ease of use, and Movi's workings are pretty painless, says Nutley. Meetings are booked as they normally would be with corporate scheduling software such as Outlook or Lotus Notes. At the designated time, Tandberg's management suite, which interfaces with these, sends an email with an embedded link, and users click to be connected with the video conference. The quality of the visual experience delivered by Movi is decent but not in the same class as high-end video conferencing telepresence systems such as Tandberg's Experia, says Nutley. These types of systems do offer a maximum immersive experience but require dedicated conference rooms and big bucks, says Turek.With Movi, Tandberg's strategy is to extend video conferencing capability beyond the conference room to make it ubiquitous, says Nutley. "Movi has the benefit of mobility, offering a business-quality experience anywhere you may be."To facilitate growth, Tandberg recently entered into a strategic partnership with Hewlett Packard Co. (HP), he says. In the past, customers who purchased HP's Halo Collaboration Studio could only communicate with other Halo suites. "We have a lot of customers where there's overlap - they've purchased Halo but also have investments in Tandberg systems."The agreement opens up corporate networks and allows the two systems to interoperate, since both are SIP-compliant. "This allows us to offer customers an opportunity to purchase Halo suites through us, and also offer them HP's managed services for their video network (HPVN)," says Nutley. "So this fulfills strategic needs for both companies."No go with CiscoNo agreement is in place with Cisco, he says. Although its TelePresence system is a big contender in the high-end space, it isn't SIP-based at present. But Cisco announced it was moving in that direction a few months ago, and most vendors are slowly but surely moving away from proprietary systems, says Turek.Business is really accelerating with Movi and many companies are expressing interest, says Nutley. But Turek doesn't believe there's a huge market yet for PC-based video conferencing. Bandwidth paranoia continues to be a stumbling block with IT departments. "Any given user should have enough bandwidth to use Movi, but the question for me is, what happens when everyone uses it at the same time on corporate networks?"At present, Tandberg assumes about five concurrent users per 100 employees in its pricing model, which works out to about US$45 per PC to deploy Movi to 120 users in a large enterprise with 5,000 employees, according to Nutley. Turek agrees those are reasonable assumptions - today.But there's a certain dichotomy in vendors' attitudes, she says. On one hand they want people to buy video conferencing systems. On the other, they charge as if the technology is precious. " Vendors want both worlds."

Tandberg puts video conferencing on Web diet

News | June 4, 2007

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