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Written by Administrator
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Friday, 19 February 2010 06:02 |
Common Barriers to Inter-Company Telepresence & Video ConferencingWe live in the age of ever evolving realities. Today's economic, geopolitical and public health realities are driving the case for inter-company telepresence and effective visual collaboration as air travel becomes more costly and increasingly time consuming.
The higher quality end-user experience of telepresence coupled with capable tools for data collaboration are providing an acceptable alternative for many face-to-face meetings.
Till recent times, telepresence equipment and network interoperability remained main hinderances towards widespread adoption of inter-company telepresence service. However, challenges like need for quality video connections with partners, vendors and customers have been made possible through dedicated video overlay networks empowered by service aware MPLS architectures.
However, cultural and operational issues around inter-company telepresence are hard to tacle. These need to be understood and addressed if meaningful benefits are to be achieved.
A recent survey on Inter-Company Telepresence & Video Conferencing lists five top barriers namely performance, security, interoperability, operational and cultural aspects. With progress on networking infrastructures, performance and security issues are likely to be catered eaasily. Increased bandwidth capacities along with tight SLAs on jitter, discards and delays ensure improved application performance and user experience. Security can be handled through the use of SBCs and various signaling and streaming encryption options. Most endpoints ship today with the option for encryption.
Two of the top barriers reasonably addressed, leaves us to interoperability, operational and cultural aspects. Interoperability is the next big challenge, because it can be solved only when the vendors collaborate to make it so. Sometimes, especially at the high end of the marketplace, the equipment from one vendor doesn't work all that well when connected to the device from another vendor. To ensure interoperability necessary standards/specifications will be needed to put in place. One such effort is from Cisco, they have created Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) and are licensing the same for free for other vendors' endpoints to join in.
Operational barriers refer to the little things that prevent people from doing what they want and need to do. It can be as trivial an issue as the fact that my company uses Outlook to schedule video rooms, while yours uses Notes. How does a user in Company A reserve a video room in Company B? How does a administrative assistant in Company A see the inventory of available rooms of Company B? Operational issues like this one is a pain that can only be addressed somewhat manually. My admin calls your admin and hashes it out on the phone; or my admin sends an email to my video managed service provider (VMSP) who coordinates with company B's VMSP.
The greatest of all is the cultural challenge. In this case, Here we have to change behavior of managers, customers, partners and suppliers. List goes on. It is important to get management to buy in, show that a video meeting, or a telepresence meeting (even rentals of telepresence suites are lots cheaper than most business trips) is better than a face-to-face. Not only cheaper, but more productive for both the customer and the sales organization.
Inter-Company Telepresence & Video Conferencing can be a real force multiplier in present challenging business environments. Following industry best practices, in this regard will enable your organization to connect with customers, partners and suppliers while reducing the hard, soft and opportunity costs of doing business. |
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Last Updated on Friday, 19 February 2010 06:09 |
