Videoconferencing is an increasingly popular way for enterprises to keep in contact, but connecting systems together still presents some challenges.
As the world becomes a more hostile place, enterprises are increasingly turning again to videoconferencing to reduce travel costs and ease threats to mobile executives having to traverse SARS- and terrorist-threatened regions to maintain face-to-face communications with branch offices, suppliers, and partners.
Technology has largely removed the frustrations of sluggish video links, line dropout at crucial points, and the other characteristics of videoconferencing which made it a choice of last resort, rather than an always-available business tool.
ISDN connections are offering increased bandwidth or, more prevalently today, internet protocol (IP) connections to provide effective communication through jitter-free vision and the ability to provide data sharing, whiteboarding, and streaming media. PC-based videoconferencing systems have enhanced its effectiveness and overall application by meeting the primary goals of conferencing: clear face-to-face communication and data transfer at any time, without having to move away from personal workspace.
IP-based systems show greatest growth as the new wave of videoconferencing gathers momentum, fuelled by improved compression technology, new cost-cutting designs, and corporate adoption of voice over IP (VoIP) telephone connections.
While ISDN connections continue to be effective, it's the integration of videoconferencing by enterprises into their VoIP technology which is pushing IP-based systems towards absorbing 75 per cent of the market within the next three years.
There is also increasing convergence with traditional Web conferencing systems to create a single interoperable and centrally managed set of key applications, and while Web conferencing vendors add video to their services, some analysts maintain that quality of service issues will keep videoconferencing off the Internet.
Still, a significant number of large organisations use Web conferencing for online meetings, allowing multiple users to see and annotate documents simultaneously while sharing applications.
But increasingly it has fallen to virtual private networks (VPNs) or dedicated private IP networks to remove administrators' concerns for quality and supply continuity, but with it has come some new worries over network saturation.
For some, the best options for deploying broadband applications over IP are creating a converged network or using a service provider to deliver videoconferencing over a dedicated IP network.
The benefit is that administrators can manage traffic by keeping it segregated and prioritised, at the same time maintaining the integrity of core network services.
For now, videoconferencing remains largely in the telecom world, kept there by the economics of maintaining IP networks, not yet sufficiently high on enterprise agendas to justify extra costs.
Digital asset management products are gaining new traction as companies seek to exploit their video, audio, and image assets after years of stockpiling product rollout, training, and other material by offering searchable access to remote users.
The emergence of new technologies such as high definition television over IP with its studio-quality resolution will offer greatly expanded opportunities for design teams like architects or aircraft engineers to collaborate with far greater effectiveness.
It's probably still five years away, but as large-screen monitor, camera, scanner, and sensor technologies continue to develop and find wider market penetration to bring costs down, tele-immersion and access-grid will take videoconferencing and virtual reality to the point where people in one office will collaborate with those in another as if working at a single site.
Multiple screens and cameras supported by 10-gigabit Ethernet technology that allows audio and video interactions are for most organisations still a distant prospect, but others like university and government laboratories are already there and major enterprises will soon follow.
Subscribe now to Australian Technology & Business magazine.
Richard Hogg is National president of the Australian Computer Society (ACS). The ACS is the recognised association for Information Technology (IT) professionals, attracting a membership (over 16,000) from all levels of the IT industry and providing a wide range of services. A member of the Australian Council of Professions, the ACS is the guardian of professional ethics and standards in the IT industry, with a commitment to the wider community to ensure the beneficial use of IT.
Visit this page for other ACS articles published by ZDNet Australia.
