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Choosing a Video
Conferencing Solution
Table of Contents
Introduction ...
3
Video Conferencing Use Cases ...
4
Video Conferencing Systems vs. Services ...
5
Video Conferencing-as-a-Service ...
6
Why Video Conferencing Isn’t Getting Cheaper ...
8
Introduction
Video conferencing is one of those technologies that seems like an obvious fit for businesses, yet it is notoriously hard to both justify and to implement. If you’re headed down the video conferencing path, you will no doubt learn of
peer organizations that have spent significant parts of their IT budgets on the technology without a corresponding return in system use. Low usage is an easy way for proponents of a big capital-intensive video conferencing project to get a black eye.
In order to get maximum use, systems must: • deliver high-quality, glitch-free results • be easy to use
• be pervasively available to the intended audience
Miss on any of these three points, and you may be spending a big pile of money with an inadequate return.
Video conferencing also can be part of broader unified communications effort — at least some sort of desktop video conferencing usually is — but for this discussion, let’s focus on the mostly commonly bundled services,
i.e., video conferencing plus screen or presentation sharing for multiple simultaneous users. Even with this narrow definition, there are many options. There are vendors with systems that reside on your premises and even more with services they’ll run for you. In this Report, we’ll sort through these options and offer some tips for how to make the best selection for your organization’s needs.
Low usage is
an easy way for
proponents of a
video conferencing
project to get a
black eye.
Video Conferencing
Use Cases
When a discussion about adding video conferencing starts, it usually revolves around some specific corporate function. For example, a sales team might need a way to conduct face-to-face discussions as it rolls out new products. For most companies this means distributed teams will need to come together on at least a monthly basis. Maybe executive teams can’t afford the time or justify the expense of physically getting together for weekly or biweekly meetings, so a combination of room-based, office-based and mobile audio conferencing systems offers an alternative.
Other scenarios include training, performance reviews, help desk, product development and marketing team meetings, and more. These internal uses have a few things in common:
• First, for most employees these uses are not daily occurrences (although for trainers or sales leads they might be).
• Second, many of these uses are fulfilled today by audio conferencing services with voice-only or voice/presentation capabilities.
It’s critical to understand the uses your company intends for its video conferencing system. Will it be used mostly for internal meetings, or mostly for meetings with business partners and customers? Will you mostly be using room-based systems or desktop systems that make use of existing cameras and microphones on laptops, tablets and smartphones?
There are some must-have features for any video conferencing system, regardless of what the primary use for the business will be:
• First, it must be easy to use. Far and away the biggest reason video conferencing systems don’t deliver on their promise is that they’re too complicated. Setting up a multiparty video conference should be no harder than setting up a conference call.
• Second, your video conferencing capability should integrate with your other workflow or unified communications offerings. For the best workflow, for example, you should be able to initiate a video call from key applications such as salesforce automation, help desk or
Whatever system
you choose must
conform to your
Video Conferencing
Systems vs. Services
If your business has decided that it needs video conferencing capabilities, your next big decision will be to choose an on-premises system, a video conferencing service or possibly a hybrid of the two.
For systems intended primarily for internal use, the issue of whether to choose a service or build your own is mostly a matter of calculating your total cost of ownership (TCO) over a four- to five-year period.
A service can better align costs to usage; however if usage is high, video conferencing services can be expensive. Some service vendors are starting to compete heavily on price. These services typically use a cloud model and employ software codecs that can more easily take advantage of improving server capabilities.
As part of your TCO calculation, you must also account for staff resources, support and upgrades. Typically infrastructure costs will be a wash as the same upgrade would be required for a service or an in-house system.
One cost that may go up is bandwidth charges. In particular, if you have a number of internal users who are not on your internal network, you may need substantially more bandwidth. Each high-definition user may require as much as 4Mbps of bandwidth, so accommodating a few hundred such users can be very expensive. Map out your potential use scenarios for bandwidth and do some trials so you aren’t caught off guard by the need to add expensive WAN upgrades.
If your internal needs are extensive, or if you’re also planning to use video conferencing with partners or customers, a hybrid approach may be the way to go. Video conferencing backend systems, multipoint control units (MCUs) can be very expensive, so you won’t want to purchase more capability than you’ll regularly use. So, for special use cases, a service will be more cost-effective. Think of the hybrid approach in the same way you do your current phone system — where the on-premises system handles typical calling needs ( e.g., two- and three-way calls), and your audio conferencing service handles the specialized needs, (e.g., large group calls).
Video Conferencing-
as-a-Service
The same reasoning with which you chose an outside service for audio conferencing should lead you to do so for certain video conferencing uses, too. The ability to maintain high-quality video streams to dozens or perhaps hundreds of viewers is for most organizations a special case need and something that your infrastructure is not geared to do.
• In particular, MCUs needed to create many video streams, often using different standards and picture quality, will be a very large capital expense when dozens or hundreds of streams are called for.
• Secondly, all of those video streams are going to be flowing out of the data center where your MCUs are housed. If you figure 1.5 - 4Mbps for a typical high-quality video stream, it doesn’t take all that many viewers before you’ll need an Internet connection in the 1Gbps range or beyond.
Also, just like audio conferencing services, video conferencing services are becoming easier to use in that they often don’t require reservations for smaller
conferences and they can offer features such as conference recording. The ability to simply email a link to virtual meeting room and start a conference any time is a powerful tool for busy users.
The big knock against video conferencing services is that they can be expensive. At the low end, which emphasizes Web conferencing over video quality, they cost $50-$70 per user, per month. If you have a few hundred salespeople or marketers who need to roll out presentations and products en masse, the cost of these services can quickly add up, but for the sake of a well-educated sales team, they’re worth the price. For high-quality systems intended to connect both rooms and individuals, monthly costs often run $250 or more per virtual port on what is essentially a cloud-based MCU.
The reasons that services (both Web conferencing and high-end video conferencing) rarely sell on usage basis fall into two camps:
The big knock
against video
conferencing
services is that they
can be expensive.
In the high-quality video conferencing space, a few smaller service providers are starting to give way on prices. In particular there’s a brewing price war between Vidyo and Blue Jeans Networks, two well-known startups in the video conferencing services business. The other service approach to video is for providers to bring in Cisco, Polycom or other high-end MCU technology and then to offer it back to you as a service. This is a classic “economies of scale” play; providers aren’t paying too much less for their technology than you would be, but they can achieve higher usage rates by selling to many customers. You certainly can save significantly on upfront capital by choosing such a service and you won’t need the in-house expertise to run it.
Of course, if you are implementing room-based systems, you’ll still need to outfit them, and many of the high-end services prefer that you build a private network to support video. So while you’ve avoided the capital and staffing cost to bring expensive MCUs in-house, you’ve still got some significant startup expenses.
If you take a three- to four-year total cost of ownership approach to your analysis, it’s not unusual to find that you’ll have spent more over the four years than if you had bought the system yourself and staffed up. Of course with a service, you don’t have to deal with your staff’s learning curve, security is probably better and so on — after all, this is what the service provider does, and it’s one of many things you do. Then, after four years, you’ll repeat the capital cycle all over again.
Why Video Conferencing
Isn’t Getting Cheaper
For the past 10-15 years Cisco, Polycom, et al have taken a hardware-heavy, private network-intense approach to audio conferencing that has served them well — especially in terms of selling expensive hardware. And if money is no object, you’ll get a fine result from these companies. But it’s also important to note that after more than a decade of this being the prevailing approach, the video conferencing market is not
all that big and video conferencing usage lags teleconferencing usage by a 500:1 margin in terms of minutes used. In a day of high-quality cameras and microphones built into almost every device, if the market is going to evolve beyond that, a different approach is required.
Two attempts to both lower the cost of video conferencing and make it more ubiquitous are embodied by the service approach taken by Blue Jeans Network and Vidyo.
Blue Jeans Network. Blue Jeans Network’s original goal was to solve the
problem of connecting disparate proprietary systems. So if you have a Cisco room system and you need to connect to a Polycom room as well as Skype users, Blue Jeans Networks can make it happen. Its MCUs are software-based and the service permits you to scale your usage up and down as you need. Because the original Blue Jeans Network’s key differentiator was to connect a variety of proprietary systems, it or something like it is a good choice for
companies that have video conferencing gear from a variety of vendors. It’s also worth considering for those who want to do video conferencing with customers or business partners and therefore can’t predict the hardware that will be on the other end.
Vidyo. Vidyo is small company — at least compared to Cisco and Polycom standards
— that’s been around a while, and has been a participant in creating the standards to which most video conferencing systems adhere. The standard most commonly in use today is called H.264. The H.264 standard is a complex one, with a number of related standards within it. Cisco, Avaya, Polycom and Lifesize use the H.264 AVC portion of the standard (AVC stands for advanced video compression). Another portion of the
Video conferencing
usage lags
teleconferencing
usage by a 500:1
margin.
Vidyo will sell you a service or on-premises hardware. At the core of their system is what they call a video router, and it is about a tenth of the cost of typical MCU.
The drawback to Vidyo’s approach is that you must use Vidyo software on all endpoints. The company can do some transcoding for non-Vidyo endpoints, but just as with every MCU, the process is computationally expensive. Whether the requirement for Vidyo software on the endpoint is a deal breaker certainly depends on how you plan to use the service. Vidyo has software for all smart phones, tablets, desktop OSs and browsers, so as long as you can run some software, you’re good to go.
If you’re looking to use video with clients and business partners, the question of installable software is a big one. Some IT departments lock down their employees’ systems so tightly that it’s even impossible to temporarily install a browser plugin. While it’s an issue now, it may be less of one in the near future. Vidyo has picked up a powerful partner in Google, where Vidyo provides the software behind Google Hangouts video chat. It’s also likely that future versions of Chrome will include Vidyo software built in.
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