Videoconferencing Receives Lots of Interest--and Plenty of QuestionsVideoconferencing Receives Lots of Interest--and Plenty of Questions

Managers realize that to deliver the benefits of videoconferencing to the largest number of users, their best bet is PC-based video, which can be used by employees from just about anywhere.

As I talk to customers around the country about unified communications, a common interest in videoconferencing is increasingly apparent. This is true regardless of the business, or the size of the organization: More and more, people are asking me about how and when they should deploy video to their end users.

Interestingly, although telepresence wows everyone who sees it, what I'm really hearing interest in is desktop and mobile videoconferencing. Managers realize that to deliver the benefits of videoconferencing to the largest number of users, their best bet is PC-based video, which can be used by employees from just about anywhere.

But these same managers are worried (terrified might be a better word) about what deploying desktop videoconferencing across the organization will do to their network, and to application performance. This is especially true for companies that have or are considering Voice over IP (VoIP), since they can't afford to have call quality impacted by other communications applications.

The bandwidth used by an individual desktop videoconferencing application is relatively small, but because large numbers of desktops can be video enabled at relatively low cost--and because doing so is important for organizations that want to let more users benefit from the technology--the bandwidth requirements quickly add up. For mid-size companies, communications infrastructures may have to sustain hundreds of users; large enterprises could see those numbers increase tenfold. IT managers are right to worry about how to make videoconferencing secure, reliable and easy for end users, without sacrificing network and application performance.

The good news is, network management capabilities continue to evolve at a fast clip, providing centralized provisioning and device management. These applications support the enterprise-wide deployment of desktop videoconferencing by handling network management, bandwidth control and QoS, along with integrated provisioning and account management. Tight, granular policy control and prioritization are key, too; many companies are defining traffic flows based on job roles and even individuals within an organization (CEOs, as a general rule, get first crack).

We also expect that as desktop video evolves, videoconferencing bridge architectures will be required to more cost-effectively support wide scale deployments. Not surprisingly, this has led to robust growth in the world videoconferencing infrastructure systems market. In 2009, revenue grew by 27.1 percent, to reach $440.6 million, and we expect it to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.1 percent, to reach revenues of $1.1349 billion by 2015.