Brockmann and Company | Customer Insights

REPORT.

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This report is based on the insights of 281 business users from around the world.

Key questions answered in this report 

The core of our research goal was to determine: how valuable is video conferencing? What would users be willing to pay to attend an HD video conference instead of an all-day 50-mile business trip? an overnight 500-mile business trip? a week-long 5,000-mile business trip?

How does video conferencing compare to audio conferences? to web conferences? 

What are the brand implications of one method of collaboration with customers as compared to another?

The state of video communications

HD video conferencing, personal video conferencing and immersive telepresence services have not yet leaped across the so-called ‘Market Chasm’ into mainstream business practice. Only 31% of our respondents participated in one or more HD video conferencing sessions in the past month. Only 11% had participated in at least one session of each of the three emerging services in that same period.

As with emerging products and services most companies struggle with two issues: how to determine the appropriate level of investment and how to justify that investment. This report offers insights into those two issues through comparative valuations.

The report reviews the classic approach comparing the service as a substitute for business travel. By looking at three distinct classes of business travel - day trips, overnight trips and week-long trips - Brockmann & Company developed a Demand curve for each class of substitution. From a review of the value of the service, a user can develop an investment plan.

This report is sponsored by Nortel and LifeSize.

Normally, I wouldn't believe it, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

Microsoft plans to work with a systems integrator to outfit a complete half million square foot data center in the Chicago area with 40-foot containers optimized for power and cooling. 

When I was in grad school, there was an entrepreneur who interviewed me and some of my classmate co-op MBA students. He had a business plan and a Canadian federal government grant to analyze the feasibility of using old railway cars to develop hydroponic production units. The point was that tomatoes and lettuce become really expensive and somewhat scarce in February in Winnipeg and Yellowknife.

I didn't get the job, and as far as I know, none of my classmates got it either. I never learned what happened to the idea.

 As this post shows, there are many, many challenges to standardizing the basic building block of every data center at a larger scale - specifically from the basic server to a server container with 1,500 servers and consuming 1 Megawatt hour of electrical power each.

May 7, 2008: I had an interesting audio conference with Daniel Tautges, President of US division of the UK software developer, Global Data Center Management or GDCM. The company created a software product that visually models the data center infrastructure's physical attributes including server location and geometries, power demands, cooling resources and cabling paths and infrastructures.

This capability is designed for data centers with more than 80 racks. Smaller data centers can get by with memory or Excel spreadsheets. Once you get to about 80 racks, the demands for work flow specialization for network, server, electrical and cooling technicians exist and the value of the GDCM product become readily apparent.

Despite the expectation that the emergence and adoption of unified communications will kill the need for voicemail and unified messaging products, AVST continues to experience mid 20% year over year growth, proving the expectation premature or just plain wrong. With the continued aging of large standalone enterprise-wide voicemail systems from the 1980s and 1990s, in particular Octel systems (now a part of Avaya), many customers are reaching out to AVST to deliver the next generation solution, or at least to implement a replacement that is current and supported. The larger systems in place in universities, government agencies and manufacturing companies for example, have been discontinued and are losing support which creates the opportunity for AVST.

The CallXpress 7.9.1 release offers several network improvements for disparate units to act as one service with easy message forwarding, backup, administrative control and call flow management services. Keeping pace with its role as an enterprise-wide application, the CallXpress offers SOAP-XML support for Web Services integration and rapid application development and deployment options using the Service-oriented architecture (SOA). 

The integratable capabilities have been available for some time through various well-developed APIs, but are now gaining traction as more IP PBX vendors tout their SOA-orientation (notably Nortel, NEC, Avaya). Voicemail services including auto attendant, messaging, notification, scheduling and the like are not necessarily readily available from the base SOA PBX platforms, or are not available in enterprise-wide packaging.

Tom Minifie, the VP of Product Management at AVST also discussed the whole notification service requirements for enterprise-scale environments. These are important to enable the public safety application in university or local government settings (also large consumers of enterprise-wide, PBX-independent messaging systems). CallXpress allows for outbound SMTP, IVR and SMS communications, but aren't typically designed to support rapid notifications of thousands of users.

Finally, Cisco introduced a telepresence package for less than $100,000 per unit.

Monday, May 12, 2008 saw the introduction of the Cisco Personal TelePresence 500 product which includes a camera, a monitor, a codec, a microphone array, a top-of-the-monitor light and a control stick for $33,900. 

The light is a good idea since participant-in-the-face lighting for most office setups (does your desk face the window?) is not widely used. 

This is disappointing on two counts. First of all the price point is about 6 x higher than others in the market and 8 x higher than typical monitor-included executive video systems. Secondly the only industry standards supported by this platform is the 120 V power supply and the Ethernet interface on the back of the codec.

Designed to allow Cisco TelePresence rooms 1000 and 3000 to communicate with lower cost devices, Cisco's portfolio still lacks interoperability with other HD video conferencing systems. They have no timetable for enabling interoperability choosing instead to drive domination. 

It seems that it may be left up to third parties to reverse engineer the complex codec algorithms and introduce interoperable bridges and services capable of binding diverse software telepresence systems together. Why not? Amdahl made a successful business reverse engineering the Front End Processor of IBM's SNA environments saving customers millions. Will Codian/TANDBERG be up to this challenge?

They've also announced a room for 15 people called the TelePresence 3200 for $340,000 list.