The expert view Steve Cassidy
Videoconferencing has always struck me as a famine-or-feast kind of thing. The numbers Nik quotes come from a seasoned player in the low to mid-range sector: by contrast (hey, it’s what I do), I seem to get war stories from the extreme top end and the bargain basement, and nowhere in between.
There are good lessons from both these spaces, such as the Cisco demonstration partnered by a paint-making company. All the rooms participating right across the world were painted the same colour, to fool the brain into thinking everyone’s in the same place. The connections were impressively fast, the sites were numerous and the distances impressive. Less so the big football commentator-style microphones: all of those bare identical walls might have helped with the psychology but they played havoc with the acoustics.
The bottom end of the market is one that the likes of Cisco don’t want to consider at all. One client had machines with Skype installed and those old, tennis ball-size webcams on them. They were rubbish, even for their era. Not that my client cared, because its conference calls normally involved watching something explode, burn, collapse or crash. In that situation, the cheapness and disposability of the VC infrastructure is actually a key enabler, and something of a cocked snook at the snowflakes who can’t have a conversation without all the walls being the same colour.
The same can be said for the numbers. The engineers’ catastrophe-incident webcams had to be bought personally because they were too cheap to fit into the corporate equipment purchasing programme. At the opposite end of the spectrum, all that matching (and dull) paint contributed to per-location costs around the £250,000 mark.
Whatever you think of the rationales behind these two deployments, both of them were quoting extreme savings, be that in time or in money spent. Nik’s assertions on savings possible with a good UC/VC setup come from a much calmer, more ordered part of the market than the one I’m used to. But here’s the punchline: no matter how distinct our sources, we’re all talking about the same gains.
Perhaps it’s because these gains come from non-technical areas that they seem so elusive, so hard to make real, in so many UC/VC projects and rollouts. It’s difficult to relate a massive drop-off in air tickets to a series of camera and laptop purchases; at least, that’s how the travel team sees the matter.