The expert view Steve Cassidy
In my opinion, the primary divide in videoconferencing is formality, not technology. The big growth in videoconferencing for business hasn’t been driven by the finance director seeing a staggering reduction in meeting costs that follow a rollout: it’s because juniors have plugged webcams into their machines and started Skyping each other. It’s rough, some calls fail; but that’s okay because they’re making informal conversational links with one another. Formal conversation over videoconferencing is far more difficult. When you look at a bit of videoconferencing kit and splutter “What’s THAT for?”, then the answer will almost certainly be to do with the management of formal relations between the conferencers.
In my experience, Cisco likes to suggest you equip all your conference spaces with the same furniture, the same videoconferencing machinery – and the same colour walls and ceilings. It feels that negotiation works better without such distractions and you get the feeling of being in one “virtual room”.
That may sound like I’m arguing for the scrappier, personal video-conferencing offerings – but these are hardly flawless. Ultimately, you need to explore what your users want, what they’re doing, and how well your current offerings support what they want to do in the future. As mentioned in the above article, it could be a simple add-on to an existing contract, it could be offering users additional collaboration features – before you invest, though, keep formality in mind. Effective videoconferencing is about the type of call people make, not the technology they use.
McGroarty was equally cautious. “Buying everything from one organisation can be expensive,” he warned. “The second-year support contract can become pricey because you’ll be locked in and your ability to negotiate will be diminished. We know our customers are much more comfortable saying they’d like to get IM and presence from Microsoft, with the possibility of extending it into voice, and they have an IP voice platform that they’d like it to be compatible with as well.”
Pricing varies widely, depending on your choice of endpoints – such as phones, screens and web clients – and the range of features you want to deploy. At the most basic level, a small organisation would begin with a web-based solution, which can integrate with consumer-grade apps such as Skype. Beyond this, you’d need to invest in a desktop client or, for the enterprise, dedicated hardware units consisting of cameras, screens and hands-free microphones. In most cases, the service would run over an existing internet connection.
On top of that, you’ll be paying for the conferencing service itself, with most first-time deployments using a cloud provider on a flat monthly fee. “That will give you so many meeting rooms in which you can have so many people,” McGroarty said. “As people really scale up their deployment they can sometimes look to bring it in-house, on premises, or host it in a data centre to avoid paying usage costs for the infrastructure.”
McLaughlin cites similarities with phone contracts. If you’re already using IP conferencing tools, say, then you could use Cisco’s Spark Hybrid Services to add collaboration features: “you might be able to pay a slightly higher monthly figure to get some cool technology to stick on the end of it.”
“The second-year support contract can become pricey, because you’ll be locked in and your ability to negotiate will be diminished”