By Jo Best, 20 March 2007 15:55
NEWS
Cisco may have just clinched a big name customer and an acquisition in videoconferencing but analysts believe conferencing vendors are missing a trick when it comes to cooperation.
Last week Cisco announced it intended to buy videoconferencing company WebEx for $3.2bn. The networking company also announced Regus, which rents out managed office space, became the latest customer for its TelePresence videoconferencing offering. As part of the deal users at 50 Regus facilities will take part in high-definition videoconference calls to colleagues and clients.
According to David Molony, principal analyst at Ovum, the acquisition indicates Cisco's move towards a more service-oriented approach.
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"Cisco has made a significant move with the Regus deal, by putting VC right in line with its professional services' strategy. Cisco is slowly redefining its technologies as services and moving into network service management (witness the Webex acquisition)," he said in a research note.
However, Moloney noted that videoconferencing is still a show-and-tell experience - and allowing participants to see a slide of a presentation or document is a far cry from true collaborative working.
"Giving presentations on VC really brings home the need to be able to share them electronically. Static display of slides is great in HD quality but they can be lost in multipoint screen shows. Vendors are still wrestling with speaker identification and indeed conferencing protocol. Control takes an astute chairman as much as anything," he said.
Molony added that the question of standards is likely to cause problems as businesses will likely want to continue using diverse standards, including HD, standard definition and extended definition after they upgrade from their legacy networks.
Comments
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1. Guy Harris
In some respects this planned aquisiition of WebEx shows that Cisco have identified the need meet the mixed demands in collaboration. Video is one aspect and in real terms is not that big a deal. Content collaboration with Webex/ Live Meeting and Centra just to name 3 tools is the real ticket item here. Most companies are using voice conferencing as "normal" and as an organisation that went from virtually none to 200k minutes a month voice is the real issue. Integration of voice and content aka Live Meeting integration to BT conferencing as an example is where organisations will see the benefits of true collaboration.
Video is nice to have but not essential and in most cases can be dismissed. As a tool to reduce travel - great but the room costs and the experience needs to improve first. The CISCO offering is at present not mature and too expensive for most organisations. Cisco / HP/ Polycom / Tamburg need to get their strategy alligned if they are going to provide true global collaboration with video or we will all end up using client technologies like Skype and Live Messenger (AKA LCS) or MSN if one is brave!