Pow wow, here and now
Written by Fleur Doidge, CRN
Calls for video conferencing are getting louder as resellers speak out for an army of adopters.
Organisations seeking to cut costs are accelerating their adoption of video conferencing technologies, according to vendors.
Kris Davies, managing director at Reading AV distributor Beyondis, said video conferencing sales have grown 400 per cent by volume this year.
Also, he is seeing a huge shift from video conferencing being a corporate and public sector opportunity to having appeal for SMEs.
A year ago, just 20 per cent of customers were SMEs, but now smaller companies make up about 60 per cent of Beyondis' video conferencing customer base, said Davies.
Money talks
Last year, the big driver in video conferencing adoption was green issues, but cost-savings are becoming the most important factor.
"No one is talking green when they are trying to keep their jobs, but they are talking about saving money," said Davies.
Smaller companies are getting real cost savings from deploying video conferencing. And because small numbers of large deals are giving way to larger numbers of small opportunities, more resellers are getting a look-in, he said. "You no longer have to be in the FTSE 100 to afford the stuff," he added.
video conferencing links are being put in to save on domestic travel costs as well, said Davies. It used to be all about offices putting room-based links between London, New York and Hong Kong, but now they are just as likely to be connecting Slough, Birmingham and Manchester.
Increasingly, video conferencing is being put in for low-cost, direct-to-the-desktop purposes, instead of into purpose-built rooms. Again, that has accelerated return-on-investment and lowered the barrier to adoption, said Davies.
Terry Dwyer, managing director of London managed network service provider Mvision, said another option for delivering cost-effective video conferencing to all sizes of customer is providing it as a managed service. The VAR has found that even large customers that can afford to invest in their own infrastructure often can do so without managing and supporting it themselves.
Savvy resellers with an armoury of service options can bundle the kit as a managed offering that provides recurring revenues. The right packages are finding favour across many business types and sizes. "We package it to enable rapid delivery without any fuss," he said. "And we are very interested in the SME space."
Mvision uses video conferencing by Tandberg for customers from SMEs to enterprise level. According to Dwyer, Tandberg gear is quick and easy to deploy, although it does take time for resellers to get up to speed.
"Video will become mainstream. Integration to the desktop also is going to be very important in the next couple of years, so we are seeing good growth," he said. "Our business model is to double each year and we are on track to do above that this year, in profit terms."
While video conferencing deployment does require specific skills, many technical people in communications or IP have parallel training that can help them adapt swiftly to the emerging technology's needs, said Dwyer.
"The skilling up is not very difficult and we run a comprehensive training system," he said.
Going for growth
Wayne Stephens, vice president of EMEA partners and alliances at Tandberg, agreed the video conferencing market is growing, with desktop deployments particularly strong.
"If firms deploy video conferencing in rooms, they are finding that those rooms become very busy. And then they become frustrated because they cannot get in to do a simple video call because the room is always in use," said Stephens.
This has the knock-on effect of encouraging organisation decision-makers to look into providing video conferencing at desktop level. With the Microsoft development of an HD-ready webcam for PCs, that trend will only intensify, he said.
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