Real Time Collaboration discussions, web conferencing, audio and video conferencing, futures
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Software is becomming the platform of choice for Unified Communications. PBX's are transforming from proprietary silod platforms to software application running on servers. The big players in this space are Micrososft, IBM and Cisco (in addition the the PBX vendors own offerings). Cisco has taken the "acquire" approach, while Microsoft and IBM are developing mostly internerally. The big challenge today is the convergence to the corporate IP network. Voice and video have unique requirements for bandwidth, and most companies are re-engineering their networks to address these new needs. Microsoft's technology is a bit trickeir since bandwidth consumption is adaptive.
Most companies are evaluating options or traffic prioritization. QOS is the most common technique. Though QOS does not guarantee a quality experience, it certainly can help network managers prioritize traffic, especially on WAN links that are already saturated.
Though we're in tough economic times, UC is still popular as businesses are looking to reduce communications costs. Audio conferencing and Web Conferencing are hard cost savings which have sparked interest of late. Businesses will still have to spend money to save money.
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Working for MSFT in the Live Meeting group (web conferencing) I spend alot of time discussing Video Conferencing with customers. The more I use video conferencing the more I start to question the value of this technology when applying to meetings. I can understand the importance of seeing a presenter of an executive webcasts, but if they are presenting data its distracting and causes the audience to lose focus. The better value I see is for the presenter to see the attendees video. Then they could adapt their presentation based on the audience's expression. As far as desktop video goes, I lose 30 minutes of productivity preparing for a video conference (comb hair, shave, nice shirt, etc.). Still pictures that can be staged and re-used are better. Maybe the better strategy is not to mix video with data conferencing since its too difficult to focus on both. With the bandwidth expense of video I don't see enterprise adoption happeneing anytime soon. What's more important: your CEO getting to Seibel to view the sales reports or Johnny IT having a video conference with Billy Sales? Maybe IP v6 is the answer, until then most should keep the video traffic on dedicated links.
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Seems like everybody is trying to ride on the IP network these days. PBX's, video conferencing providers, VOIP. Problem is, current networks are not designed for audio and video. Real time conferencing components such as voice and video require significant "sustained" bandwidth. Private networks have features such as QOS/bandwidth reservation, but not the public networks. The next generation of IP (IP6) is better suited for rich communications but it may be some time before its widely adopted. In the mean time customer will need to decide if these technologies are worth the bandwidth expense. Microsoft Office Communicator offer audio and video conferencing out of the box, however peer to peer only. Multi-party is supported with a partner such as Radvision or Polycom. You will also need partner solutions to enable A/V over the public internet, since NAT and UDP do not traverse firewalls (research session border contollers/Jasomi).
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