We see that video is ushering in a new future for companies where organizations will move from a command and control model to a collaboration model and companies are well poised to ride this wave. Videoconferencing is no more just a boardroom affair, there is also an increased use of high-definition videoconferencing systems for interviewing candidates, interaction with friends and relatives in foreign locals, reviews and meetings, product launches, press conference auditioning actors and the like.
The videoconferencing market in India is growing at a relatively fast pace with remarkable technological upgrades and mass adoption. According to a Frost & Sullivan report, the Indian videoconferencing market grew at a steady pace in 2011, with total revenues of US$83.1 million and a growth rate of 38.7 percent. This rapid adoption of videoconferencing solutions was spurred by adoption in the Indian enterprises and the government sector. Indian firms are quickly beginning to realize that face-to-face meetings are more productive than connecting over the phone. In addition to the convenience, the cost, time and resources spent in business travel are proving to be a significant burden for the SMBs.
Avenues of Video Conferencing as a service…
Though video conferencing is gaining momentum, the adoption level is still to catch pace - given the lacuna in bandwidth. Infrastructure is largely skeletal and hence is unable to boost up first-rate videoconferencing. Can this issue be tackled if things are taken up in collaboration - in other words, can videoconferencing as a service bring in better viability? Here are the takes of major players in this arena. Minhaj Zia, Director, Collaboration, Cisco India and SAARC, confirms, "Videoconferencing as a service is gaining traction and we expect this market to grow significantly in the future. However, service providers operate under tremendous pressure to continually offer new collaborative applications. It is well understood that offering effective ways for enterprise subscribers to collaborate with their customers, partners and suppliers leads to sustaining high usage and perceived value of premium bandwidth services." He further adds that Cisco has developed a superior way to enable organizations to connect. The Cisco TelePresence Exchange System integrates full high-definition video, advanced audio and interactive collaboration tools with the underlying network as the platform to deliver immersive meeting, interoperability, and advanced media services to enhance telepresence collaboration experiences. Today, a lot of service providers offer telepresence as a service. Cisco has collaborated with service providers like AT&T, BT, Orange, Tata, Verizon and others to offer TelePresence services.
Neeraj Gill, Managing Director, Polycom, India & SAARC, opines, "We believe that videoconferencing as a service has a great potential for growth as well as a greater mass appeal. In fact, in line with the demand we see from this solution, Polycom has also detailed its strategy to enable service providers to offer cloud-delivered, Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) solutions to its customers. As part of this announcement, Polycom unveiled its Polycom RealPresence Cloud, a wholesale, carrier-ready offering to enable service providers to quickly bring to market VaaS offerings. Polycom's RealPresence Cloud solutions are designed specifically for service providers to equip them with the carrier-grade infrastructure, endpoints and services they need to offer businesses of all sizes subscription-based solutions for video collaboration."
Undoubtedly, these solutions have helped Videoconferencing move from boardrooms to the mobile going beyond the regular clientele of large business organizations to the small and medium enterprise (SME) market, through a service provider, delivered at a monthly fee, making it an operating expense rather than a capital expense.
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| Deepak Braganza Country Manager - India and South Asia, LifeSize Communications | Neeraj Gill Managing Director Polycom, India & SAARC | Minhaj Zia Director, Collaboration Cisco India and SAARC |
"Videoconferencing as a service breaks a lot of entry barriers for customers. VaaS brings down the total cost of ownership drastically. Also, in this model the scalability issue which is restricted due to heavy capex requirement for higher capacity MCUs, is eliminated. Sify videomeet takes this one step ahead - the services can be utilized on any general purpose internet and any device type - mobile, tablet, laptop or dedicated room systems. This makes adoption of videoconferencing as a collaboration tool very easy, since it involves devices and networks, which the users are already used to. This naturally helps in increased demand of the service," explains Sukanta Pal, Head – Marketing, Sify Technologies Limited.
Speaking on the brighter picture of videoconferencing in the future, Deepak Braganza, Country Manager - India and South Asia, LifeSize Communications, says that Broadband availability is now much better than it was three to five years back. Now there are more and more options due to wireless technologies. SMB is one of the key markets and sify also focus heavily on Education and Healthcare markets.
Emphasizing on the feasibility of VaaS, Sukhvinder Ahuja, Lead - Unified Communications for Microsoft India, says, "With mobile and geographically dispersed workers becoming increasingly common, videoconferencing is a crucial tool for facilitating rich communication anywhere, anytime. One of the biggest drivers for video conferencing as a service today is the business need for seamless, instantaneous and cost-effective mobility. Not only do corporates use videoconferencing feature but the public sector is also adopting such facilities to save travel costs and increase productivity."
Opportunity for VARs…
With an increased usage of videoconferencing solutions across all verticals, VARs have come to take up a significant role especially when videoconferencing is offered as a service.
Sukanta of Sify points out that VaaS opens a huge market to the VARs. They can approach the SMBs for Videoconferencing with zero Capex and increase the wallet share of the customer, They can even approach large enterprises, who would buy Video Equipments at few select locations with an offer to empower a larger employee base with desktop or laptop based HD quality video conferencing, that too with no additional Capex.
Videoconferencing as a Service opens up new opportunities for VARs, as it helps them deliver solutions to the wider SMB audience. Explaining this further, Neeraj Gill of Polycom says that to enable its partners to deliver Unified Communications (UC) services reliably, cost-effectively and with a differentiated experience, Polycom has built the most scalable and robust platform to deliver these services through the Polycom RealPresence Platform. With a foundation built on standards and open interoperability, combined with deep integration into leading UC platforms through the Polycom Open Collaboration Network, Polycom provides a broad range of opportunities for services providers to capitalize on this growing market opportunity.
Minhaj Zia of Cisco points out that over the past few years, a lot of Indian companies have gone global, especially in the IT and ITeS segment and they have been the primary adopters in this space. Today, Cisco is seeing a lot of interest in verticals beyond ITeS. There is an increased usage of videoconferencing solutions in the public sector, banking and financial segment, hospitality, judiciary and healthcare. There is also a heightened interest from small and medium businesses. Customers in these sectors are slowly but surely recognizing how videoconferencing can impact their day-to-day functioning and overall business goals and this opens up a huge opportunity for Cisco and its partners.
Finally…
With an escalating number of smart devices in the market, there is also an equal demand for creation of a smart ecosystem that fosters integration of real-time communication services, thereby delivering value to the end-consumer or enterprise. Additionally, convergence has been the key factor spurring this growth, with an increasing focus on creating mobile applications that are available to the user anytime, anywhere. Hence, the need for mobility-based videoconferencing systems is gradually growing. Consumers can now use their own devices to connect and collaborate face-to-face with colleagues, partners, customers, students, patients - no matter how far or where they are.
