Quality and Affordability of Video Collaboration is Driving Unified Communication Tools Adoption - Corporate Tech Decisions
Many of the barriers to adoption of Unified Communications (UC) solutions have been banished. High-speed bandwidth and quality-sensitive applications like videoconferencing have become more affordable and video systems have become simpler to deploy. Now videoconferencing is becoming one of the standardly deployed components of UC systems.
According to an October 2013 study by Infonetics Research, 87 percent of enterprises surveyed plan to add videoconferencing to their UC architecture by August 2014. “The biggest change we’re seeing in unified communication deployments is the adoption of video,” notes Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Businesses have been implementing more mobility into their UC architectures over the past year and now are looking toward videoconferencing to help drive further productivity.”
“The vendors that can effectively deliver integrated video and mobility into their UC solution and do so in a simple and easy-to-use manner will be best positioned for success,” adds Myers. “According enterprises participating in our UC survey, Cisco and Microsoft are the leaders in unified communications thanks to their installed base and perceived positions of leadership.”
“It’s a perfect storm, helping the adoption of video. People are collaborating…some with people from three to five locations. Travel budgets are being cut, and it’s easier to adopt video,” says Bill Zakowski, senior manager in Avaya’s Unified Communications Solutions Marketing group. “We’re seeing product managers, program managers, engineers see video as a way to help build teams and help people perform better.”
While companies have been focusing their investments on established enterprise vendors with roots in networking hardware, business software and communications applications, many new companies are entering the market as well as rebranding and banking on the adoption of UC solutions. In October, 2013 Siemens Enterprise Communications changed its name to Unifyto take advantage of a growing interest in hosted unified communications.
The Leaders
Each of these vendors offers an integrated UC package that includes an integrated video collaboration tool. Cisco’s version is called Jabber, Microsoft Lync includes videoconferencing and Avaya’s UC platform has Aura. That’s not to say that the choice of UC vendor necessarily determines an organization’s entire video strategy. A UC solution’s video collaboration applications are usually used only among employees, while an enterprise video conferencing system is used to communicate with people outside of the organization.
Stephen Held, chief information officer of Leo A Daly, an international architecture and engineering firm, describes their “best of breed” approach to video. “Three years ago, we decided that we would leverage Microsoft to satisfy the software component and Cisco to address the hardware component of our UC platform. In an organization of 1,000 employees across 31 locations, we have several hundred webcams deployed to utilize the system,” says Held.
In fact, Leo A Daly came to video collaboration through videoconferencing. Held says that international clients wanted to be able to communicate through video, which demonstrated for the firm the value of the medium for both external and internal collaboration. And because they had established a Microsoft Exchange environment for calendaring, it made sense to choose Microsoft’s UC package.
“Once you get people comfortable with using [calendaring] technology to make themselves more efficient on a meeting basis, it was moving them to the next step — [to] coordinate more easily, communicate more easily,” Held says.
Leo A Daly has been using Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) for the last three years and recently upgraded to Microsoft Lync Server 2010. Users naturally came to prefer using the UC platform for communication than their conference bridge, especially because they can start talking in an (IM) message chat and easily escalate to a videoconference as needed.
Microsoft Lync
As Held hints at, Microsoft’s video collaboration feature is inextricable from the rest of the UC platform. Through one interface, users can access Web and videoconferencing, voice, presence, and IM. Lync is accessible through Microsoft Office applications like Outlook, Word and SharePoint. It allows for both scheduled and spur of the moment videoconferences, and participants can join from their computers or smartphones.
Lync Server 2010 is available in two different versions: Standard and Enterprise. According to Microsoft, the Standard Edition is intended for organizations with fewer than 5,000 users and no high availability or performance requirements. Along with the usual UC features, its videoconferencing capabilities allow users to launch PC-to-PC video communications and authenticated internal conferences. The Enterprise Edition handles an unlimited number of users, provides scalability and high availability, and allows for videoconferences with internal and external users.
Lync’s videoconferencing goes beyond a simple chat window. It can display a 360-degree video panorama of a meeting room, and, if there are several people in the meeting, it can detect the speaker and display that person in the video window for all the other participants. It enables application and screen sharing and whiteboarding, a feature that Held calls a “necessity” for Leo A Daly’s engineers.
“We want to be able to do markups of drawings and documents right there, and [get an] instant digital recording,” he says. And, as Held explains, it can be used for more than videoconferencing. “When we launched our latest intranet, we made training videos with Lync and posted them. We’ll be recording more training and more recording presentations — Lync has made recording and publishing that content a lot easier.”
Lync can be purchased as an installed client-server solution or subscribed to as a hosted service. Microsoft’s most recently published pricing for the client-server model is $31 per Lync 2010 Client, $699 for the Standard Edition server software, and $3,443 for the Enterprise Edition server software. Lync Online pricing for Plan 1 (whose features are the same as the Standard Edition) is $2 per user per month, and Plan 2 (which mimics the Enterprise Edition) is $6.50 per user per month. Mobile clients can be downloaded for free through the appropriate app store.
Cisco Jabber
As a networking hardware and communications software vendor, Cisco products span everything from the infrastructure that supports a voice and video network to the applications that enable all modes of collaboration. To deploy Cisco’s video collaboration application, you need to install Jabber, a key part of the Cisco UC suite.
Jabber is in most ways the same as Lync. It also includes voice, presence, instant messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing, and allows users to
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This infographic from Avaya demonstrates the vast number of mobile devices that have entered the BYOD marketplace which helps enable a unified communications deployment.
Another difference is with client endpoints — Jabber integrates with Cisco’s Unified IP phones, Cisco WebEx MeetingCenter and Cisco TelePresence connections. Also, Cisco offers an SDK (software development kit) for Jabber, which lets programmers build integration with Jabber, including videoconferencing, into their own home-grown Web applications.
Clearly, Jabber is a good fit for enterprises with extensive investments in Cisco communications hardware and software. Jabber is available based on the platforms you intend to deploy it to. For instance, there’s a Jabber for Windows application and a Jabber for Mac, and both of them are purchased through Cisco resellers. The mobile versions, such as Jabber for iPhone, can be freely downloaded.
Jabber also differs from Lync in that the server components aren’t part of the package. Jabber requires several components from Cisco’s Unified Communications System, including Unified Communications Manager, a call procession solution, and the Unified Presence platform. Your Cisco reseller can help you figure out which components you need to deploy Jabber on your network, as well as determine licensing fees (which are not publicly published).
Avaya Aura
Avaya is the third UC leader identified by Gartner, and it’s attempting to further bolster its place in the market through acquisitions; it recently purchased Radvision, a telepresence and videoconferencing solutions vendor. In terms of UC, its offering is Aura Conferencing Standard Edition. Like Jabber, Aura Conferencing requires a UC platform, in this case, the Aura Communications Platform.
“You can buy what you want; you can buy ala carte. The infrastructure is the same, regardless of the features,” explains Avaya’s Zakowski. “The voice and video network, with Aura, can be one and the same.”
That means that when you buy Aura Conferencing, conferencing abilities are all you get. You can deploy it for just audio or for integrated audio, video, and Web conferencing. An additional Web Conferencing module is required for application and desktop sharing, unlike the other two video collaboration applications.It integrates with the other Aura components, including Aura Messaging and Aura Presence Services.
Aura Conferencing can support as many as 500 concurrent users, either in scheduled meetings or on-the-fly video calls. It can be accessed by internal users as well as users outside of your firewall, making it useful as a third-party videoconferencing application.
It works with desktops and laptops via the Avaya the one-X Communicator with the Avaya Flare Experience and Avaya’s proprietary endpoints, including the Desktop Video Device. Although one-X Communicator is available for smartphones and the Flare Communicator for iPads, they don’t support mobile videoconferencing. Like Jabber, Aura Conferencing must be purchased through a licensed reseller.
For many enterprise organizations, choosing a video collaboration app comes down to what may already be installed. Aura Conferencing is an easy choice for organizations invested in Avaya’s UC and communications platforms, while others, like Leo A Daly, may naturally turn to Microsoft Lync. Regardless of your vendor, deploying UC and video collaboration is no easy matter — consider engaging your reseller to help you assess your network readiness for handling video traffic and determining the features that will best support your organization’s goals.
Manage Services
A growing trend is to outsource some, if not all videoconferencing services. A managed services plan provides an outlet of experts to navigate the constantly morphing communications solutions for a company. There are issues that come up along the way when an outside source is providing tech support and advice on a regular basis.
AVI-SPL has a two-pronged approach to managed services. The Video Network Operations Center (VNOC) is a management tool that allows AVI-SPL to manage all customers’ video calls and infrastructure. The Symphony Management Platform provides customers with Web and mobile access to scheduling, monitoring and reporting functionality. AVI-SPL uses the Symphony platform for management control in order to monitor as well. Symphony allows users to view at a glance, if systems are active, have pending trouble tickets and if conferences have launched as expected. “Some people want us to make sure the equipment is working, but they want to be able to operate their own equipment and only reach out to us when they need help,” says Mike Brandofino, EVP of Video and Unified Communications at AVI-SPL.
New Players
Unified communications and collaboration were an overriding theme at InfoComm 2013. A couple of terms are emerging in this category of collaboration products, which separates these from videoconferencing systems: “group rooms” and “huddle rooms,” suggesting an ease of use for the end user and the lack of costly endpoints. Automation and control companies AMX and Crestron announced new products specific to collaboration and unified communications.
Expect to see many more companies offering even more solutions in 2014.
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