Video conferencing update
The traditional method of boardroom video conferencing has been marred with diffi culties ever since its introduction – it is often limited, costly, complex to install, and therefore only available to large corporations with big budgets.
Even for those companies able to aff ord the technology, it is still often only available to a limited few within a team.
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That’s why Avaya, a specialist in video collaboration and communications solutions, is not just targeting big corporations, it is also delivering solutions to small-to-medium businesses by making the technology available on mobile devices and opening it up to existing video conferencing hardware.
Avaya A/NZ managing director Tim Gentry says that this flexibility was previously unavailable in the video market. He even goes as far as saying that the video conferencing and telepresence markets have ultimately failed up until this point.
“When it was introduced, the technology promised to save businesses money on travel and help colleagues collaborate with each other. This simply hasn’t been the case,” Tim says.
“Not everybody was connected within a company – it was usually only the top-end management who could communicate with each other. Even then, they usually had to be in their executive boardrooms to use the technology.
“It was a failure of a marketplace because it was complex, there was no intelligence in the video stream to cater for diff erent bandwidths and it was too expensive for a small business to carry.”
The cost of the systems has undoubtedly limited the number of businesses that have been able to use video as a viable tool within the workplace, however the complexity of systems has also been prohibitive to the growth of the technology in a wider sense.
“Every time you wanted to make a call you’d have to get the IT guy to come into the room just to get it working,” Tim says.
That’s why, by lowering the cost of video conferencing and making it simpler to use, Avaya is aiming to change the primary demographic of the technology.
“These days you can buy an Android device for under $100 and we can send video directly to that device from a room-based system. This makes these tools much more accessible to everybody within a company.”
Additionally, a major hurdle with video conferencing was that systems have often been tied to a proprietary manufacturer; not allowing communication with users on different systems.
“Video technology is currently designed in a way that a Samsung Galaxy can talk to another Samsung Galaxy, but it can’t communicate with an iPhone. We want them all to be able to talk to each other,” Tim explains.
“We want to take an agnostic standpoint, encouraging other brands to be integrated into our system and letting customers choose what they want to deploy. You can use Samsung, iPhone, Cisco, Polycom or Avaya, it doesn’t matter – we just ‘sit’ in the middle and allow you to connect.
“When you pick up your phone and call somebody, you don’t know what phone they’re using. This should be the same for video,” Tim adds.
“We’re trying to make the whole process more user-friendly and more affordable. That way, small-medium businesses can start to leverage the technology. Once we get those smaller companies on board, that’s when it will naturally reach the masses, and that’s when we will see an uptrend in the technology as a whole.”
The big question for installers is: if manufacturers are looking to bring the cost of video conferencing down, is it still a profitable venture for them?
“We make it profitable through our partner model,” Tim explains.
“Unlike some other companies who strangle their value chain, we believe in making sure our partner model is healthy and we can help work with our installers, so they have the ability to consult with customers. “We’ve found that the biggest hurdle for our company, however, is that customers have already been burned by video in the past.”
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