Video Collaboration at the VCIG 2012
October, 23, 2012 – Collaboration…Your Way, Monterey, CA Stuart Monks, Vice President of Group Solutions, Technology and Architecture, at Polycom was the keynote speaker at a video conferencing summit. He sees the future of videoconferencing as the core of industries such as distance learning, telemedicine, manufacturing & operations, customer service and business continuity. These areas favor the adoption of these technologies for their contributions to productivity and cost reductions. A key driver on the cost reduction are “green” benefits of the video conferencing solutions over short duration physical travel.
Needless to say, the adoption is predicated upon a proper ecosystem for video conferencing. This ecosystem is built of 4 main pieces: drivers, innovation, performance, and standards. Drivers consist of hybrid cloud delivery, web-centric “client”, and the evolving smartphone / tablet capabilities and mobile / land based connectivity.
Innovation and new developments are needed in social business software. The creation of collaboration spaces instead of meeting rooms, as well as cloud analytics and big data are needed. System-level performance requires advancement in mobile and video based chipsets to deliver ubiquitous HD video and end-to-end bandwidth with local compute capability to enable a software-only solution. The pervasive use wireless HD to enhance the user experience will also be required.
Finally, standards for interoperability and apps drive the need for open APIs. The next generation H.265 codec needs to be ratified, as well as HTML5 and web RTC proliferation will be transformative to the development cycle. IMS is working on providing an immersive video telepresence standard.
Predicting industry adoption for the next few years, Monks pointed to Web RTC as viable in 2012, followed soon after by early adoption in 2013. he following year will see the start of mass adoption. He also saw thee same scenario in XHP.
There were questions about 3G/4G/ nG, that Monks said were capped for the next few years due to the problems in building new towers.
