BANGALORE, INDIA: Video conferencing is certainly not a new application to enterprise communications users. Room to room video conferencing has grown from its introduction at the World's Fair in 1964 to a widely deployed enterprise application around the globe. Video conferencing as a general business application however, while promising to become mainstream during the last 50 years, has remained a special purpose application and a niche market.
Video conferencing' inherent benefits, such as facilitating in-depth interaction levels and reducing travel expenses have often been offset by a number of technology and operational issues. Expanded bandwidth and special networking requirements have limited its integration with the enterprise's overall communication network and made it an overlay application that required special attention and administration.
Today, a number of changes have occurred that are stimulating an increased interest in video conferencing as a mainstream business application. The first change has been the growing deployment within businesses of IP Telephony based upon converging voice and data networks into a single integrated and robust network with enough bandwidth to accommodate video applications.
By creating a networking layer that can easily incorporate video streams into its transport mechanisms, the move to IP networks has broken down one of the technical barriers to broader deployment of video conferencing.
A second change enabled by IP Telephony is the ability to set up sessions that can carry multiple media streams while using telephony and windows based interfaces to achieve click-to-dial video conferencing setups between parties on the conference. Multi-party conferences can also be set up using video bridge technologies in a similar fashion.
A final factor that is facilitating a leap in the ease of use for video conferencing is the incorporation of SIP enabled presence within soft phone applications. This technology allows users at their desktops trying to set up a video conference to know if the person they are connecting to has the ability to enable a video call from their end.
Video conferencing can be easily added to a voice call by simply activating the video application on each end of the existing call.
The migration to IP Telephony along with the incorporation of standards based interfaces to other applications promises to open the door to a rapid expansion of video conferencing. Ironically, video conferencing is being discovered as a "new" IP enabled productivity application.
In addition, the extension of business telephony features to video endpoint devices makes video calling as natural as voice calling, while providing enterprise class call handling capabilities and scalability. For example, users now can have the ability to setup a call coverage path for a video call in the same way and with the same capabilities as a voice call.
If somebody calls on a video endpoint and the called party is not at their desk, a coverage path would direct the call to voicemail or a coverage assistant. The system can recognize whether the receiving endpoint (i.e. voicemail system or coverage assistant) has video capabilities and if not, the call would fall back to a voice only call. Easy call set up and coverage features had not been available for video until now.
