Video Conferencing: Cost-Effective Communication Tool

According to a recent Frost & Sullivan report, video conferencing adoption grew at 23.1 percent in 2008 and this fast-growing market is forecasted to maintain a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 23.9 percent through 2015. Shivasankar K, country manager, LifeSize Communications (India), talks to Biztech2.com about this budding market.

What are the drivers of video conferencing?

The ongoing phase of recession has been a major driver of video conferencing. Increased awareness about the varied benefits of video conferencing technology has led to the growth of video conferencing, in addition to increased productivity, lowering bandwidth prices and increasing CSR. The market will also see a lot of innovation, which will completely eliminate the need to travel for business.

How has this market shaped up in the last one year?

Even with the slowdown impacting IT spending across the industry, the growth and adoption of video conferencing has seen an increase. In fact, recession acted as an opportunity for the growth of video conferencing technology because every enterprise wanted to cut down on travel costs, be efficient and utilise varied resources. With cost-cutting being top-of-mind for every enterprise, video conferencing saw a boom in all sectors including corporates, mid-size firms, SMEs and the government sector.

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While the primary sector continued to grow at a steady rate, there was a sudden spur in the adoption, especially in the government sector. The public sector paradoxically ensured that VC had a better run despite the overall slowdown.

Compounding this were factors like the growth of technological awareness and innovation among corporates. Indian organisations understood the importance of technologies like Telepresence and Unified Communications (UC). Telepresence provides a human touch to technology as it provides an immersive collaboration experience where remote participants are lifelike in size and voice and visual clarity is immense, unlike standard definition video conference where the picture is blurred, jumpy and shabby, which can interrupt important business decisions of a company.

What challenges, especially on the network front, come up for a CIO to deal with?

While IP networks are prevalent across organisations, most of these networks employed are for IT/ data applications. Video can be run on the same network, but will require the network to be tuned to meet the demanding requirements of video. Network QoS and bandwidth allocation for video use should be configured optimally. To achieve good quality video results, network quality itself should be enhanced.

How do you see the market shaping up in the next one year?

In India, as per our experience, the adoption of HD video conferencing is happening across the board. Traditionally, education and health verticals have the potential to be drivers of VC adoption.

With the availability of broadband on the rise, and the growing awareness about the benefits of video conferencing technology, we see the VC market growing to a greater extent in the year ahead.

What is LifeSize Communications’ India roadmap?

In the India market, we see a trend shift now and would want to go aggressive in promoting HDVC. Secondly, to increase our reach in the market, we are engaging with leading system integrators and VC solution providers. This includes traditional VC solution providers and also IT/ Telco solution providers with good reach in the Indian market. Through this network, LifeSize will endeavour to make video available to every user.