On Rad's Radar? - tele-presence Archives

Vidtel Makes WebRTC Available with MeetMe

2013-01-31T16:48:06Z

WebRTC is an open-source application interface that allows real-time services like voice, video, and data sharing to work within a web browser. Vidtel's MeetMe and Gateway services both natively support WebRTC, empowering businesses to utilize video conferencing in entirely new ways.

VidTel's MeetMe service is an any-to-any cloud-based video conferencing service. To better explain that, it means that a customer can get video conferencing in the cloud, with no complex, costly bridges to maintain on-premise; even better, the Vidtel service also supports any-to-any, so in addition to supporting Cisco/Polycom/etc video devices, it also supports Google Talk, Skype.....and now, attendees calling in directly from a web browser via WebRTC.

So I had an (email) conversation with Alex Doyle, a long-time pal and the VP of Marketing at VidTel. Here's why this is blog worthy :), and why WebRTC in general, is important.

"Impediment Buster" - Doyle thinks historically, there have been a few key impediments to the take-up of video conferencing. End-point cost is high and management of video conferencing gear is complex and tricky. [High bandwidth circuit costs too.] Traditionally, Doyle says, "there's long development and R&D time in bringing out video end-points, and video has been relatively siloed. With WebRTC (plus cloud-based video conferencing), you can make the argument that these impediments have vanished - the bridge is in the cloud, and the "end-point" is just the browser. (There's not even an app or a plugin to download - unlike some of our competitors.)

"New Markets" - Doyle states that traditionally it's something that has been accessible only to the large enterprises - companies that could afford tele-presence rooms. With WebRTC and cloud based video, all of sudden there's an opportunity for the mid-market to benefit from video conferencing.

"Innovation and New Apps" - Doyle continues, "If you think about it, every HDX (health data exchange) on the market is basically the same thing. Building custom video end--points (like a tele-medicine "cart") is pretty expensive and takes a long time to get to market. But with WebRTC, if you think about it, the cost of building a new video app has been driven down to the cost of building a web page. Video suppliers can build custom apps like video interviewing, video health checkups, video consulting, etc as easily as they can build a web site. I think there's a huge opportunity here for innovation." So do quite a few pioneers in the WebRTC space, many of whom were at TMC's first WebRTC Conference.

I still think that video conferencing (like HD Voice and Cloud) is more hype than actual revenue. However, for a telecom agent or VAR, it takes multiple streams of income - and many tools in the toolbox - to make a successful business.

VidTel and ACT! teamed up.

It looks like service providers are starting to see video conferencing (and collaboration) is a must-have instead of a nice-to-have. PBX-Change launched miMeeting, a simple-to-use, feature-rich web and video conferencing tool organizations can use to host interactive and engaging online meetings, webinars, training sessions and events.

Microsoft Lync in my Opinion

2012-11-28T14:48:12Z

Have you been hearing buzz about Microsoft Lync? Microsoft is spending millions on marketing it - and I hear that the Fortune 100 have deployed it but in limited roles.

My brother works for a Microsoft integrator who has 135K seats deployed. I'm not even sure what that means, because Lync isn't being used exclusively as a landline or PBX replacement. It has many uses and not all of them are apparent. For example, it is can be deployed just for Presence and IM/chat. It can also be used for a conference bridge (like in the Office 365 bundle - does that constitute a seat?).

Sure, it CAN be deployed as a voice replacement BUT you still have to have SIP trunking from a voice provider. (Lync is not a dialtone provider; that will come from the SIP Provider.) Lync will act like a PBX in this setting.

Remember that Lync is the 3rd edition of Microsoft's Office Communicator Server. IMO, MS has not decided what they want from it yet.

Skype, mobile apps, messenger, Presence, PBX, conferencing -- it is all very cludgy. By that I mean, it isn't straightforward; it isn't user friendly.

My fears lie in the fact that Microsoft can't make a product that doesn't have to be patched every day due to too much bloated code and too many unnecessary features. And Lync has a lot of features. (Adobe is giving it a run for its money in patching Flash though.) Then by the time the user has a stable operating system (like XP SP3), Microsoft rolls out a new one - and we start all over again (from unstable and what many would call beta!)

My brother likens Lync to Sharepoint. Once people know what it can do... Well, more like, once it is thrust upon the users.

When you try to be something to everyone, you end up lost.

So Many Conferencing Options

2012-05-29T16:54:19Z

Just Google web conferencing to see 18 million results. This list of web conferencing is extensive but far from complete. Conferencing is starting to look like the VoIP space -- a bunch of people jumping in to get a piece of the action. Join.me, StartMeeting.com, Freeconference.com, Yuuguu.com, G+ Hangout, skype and so many more in the no cost variety. These no cost providers compete against the big guns like PGi, Intercall, Cisco's Webex, The Conference Group, Citrix's GoToMeeting, and on24.

As an aside: BigMarker.com is a different concept. More like G+ Hangout, BigMarker is about community collaboration.

One thing for agents to think about: IF there are hundreds of providers out there in any sector, then there IS demand for conferencing - video, audio, web. You should try to grab a piece of it.

If you wanted tips on selling conferencing, the TCA had a panel of conferencing channel execs give pointers in October of 2011. TCA members can watch it on-demand from the archives.

In the video conferencing space, it is becoming a buffet - wholesale, white-label, reseller, and retail; hardware and appliances; gateways and translators for interoperability; smartphone apps and softphones; API's; recording; and webcasting. I guess since airline travel is getting more expensive (and more of a PITA), video conferencing use is increasing. Moreover, with companies cutting the workforce for "synergies", the stranded employees have to do more and more (with less and less). Technology has to provide some productivity gains - the holy grail of cloud communications (of which, video conferencing is one component). Add to that the price of entry for video conferencing has dropped significantly. Sure you can buy a $100K telepresence room, but even $500 laptops come with decent webcams. Smartphones even have high resolution cameras that make video conferencing possible (if there is a strong enough 3G/4G connection and you have enough bandwidth left under the cap).

While video conferencing will not replace face-to-face or a live handshake, it definitely has its use during the sales process.

Polycom Gets Some Cash

2012-05-11T17:22:31Z

So Polycom announced that they will "divest its enterprise wireless voice solutions business to an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners, Inc. for gross proceeds of approximately $110 million in cash." I was confused by this until I realized it is a sliver of their business and represents DECT and Wi-Fi handsets only.

Polycom is in the process of remaking themselves from a hardware IP Phone company to a video conferencing solution provider. This was a way to get some cash and start selling off pieces of the business that don't fit that focus.

One Quick Note About Cloud

2011-04-05T18:44:31Z

I keep reading all these projections for Cloud and I have to wonder: Has everyone forgotten that a good portion of this used to be Hosting? Shared Hosting; Managed Hosting; Dedicated Server; Collocation; Digital Hands. This isn't new. Plus it isn't like RackSpace doesn't door knock to see if a business has a server to move to their data center. So there is going to be plenty of growth in Cloud.

Remember that SAAS is everywhere; best example is email. It's QuickBooks online. It's e-filing to state and federal apps. Everywhere. We just never called it that before.

Stephanie Mosca wrote an article today about the growth of enterprise mobility and many other segments like all kinds of conferencing, cloud comm and collab (UC 2). Of course, there is growth in these sectors because a couple of years ago, sales were slim to none. So I get the media buzz about the growth, but let's keep in mind that 35% of $1 million in sales isn't moving the multi-trillion dollar IT or telco needle much.

But all this media buzz and ground breaking growth means get onboard NOW! Learn as much as you can and look for opportunities. This segment will only grow.

Chat With JCurve About 2011

2010-12-16T01:51:10Z

Eli Johnson, Business Development Manager at J-Curve Technologies, chats with me for about 13 minutes about Broadsoft Connections 2010, Hosted UC and the obstacles that Cloud Communications providers face in the new year.

J-Curve offers Hosted PBX providers an outsourced customer service and tech support option.

Expectations in 2011 with Jon Arnold

2010-12-16T01:43:24Z

Jon Arnold joins me for a chat about what to expect in 2011. We touch on Acme Packet, SBC, security, outages, IPv4, Cloud and Social CRM. It's a full 25 minutes.

Were There Highlights in 2009?

2009-11-25T20:25:02Z

Ken Camp's Year in Review prompted me to write this. It's been an interesting year. SIP, UC, Cloud, Merger. That's really how I see the blur that was 2009. I attended so many conferences this year. The highlight was speaking at so many. So to the organizers, like TMC, thank you so much for letting me have a podium.

Ken points out Voxeo. I point out Ifbyphone.

Many regional CLEC's and VoIP Providers had positive moves this year. A round of applause to Hunt Telecom, Socket, PBX-Change, FreedomIQ, Sonic.Net, Kinex, Smoothstone and Telesphere. (Full disclosure: I worked with many of these companies so I saw the growth first hand).

I saw so much M&A activity this year despite the economy. We also saw XO clean up its balance sheet.

We saw Agents get cut and get mad - even as the Channel seats at the carriers became musical chairs in 2009. So many Channel folks moving around, I got dizzy with all the business card exchanges at the shows. (Reminder: keep your LinkedIn profile up to date and with a non-work email so you can stay in touch). I don't know if it is growth in the Channel, but lots of carriers and master agents were hiring channel managers this year.

TCA had a good year, seeing agent numbers increase. The TCA is currently working on a Code of Ethics and a Best Practices Guide for Agents for 2010. (Join in! It's a work in progress that can use your input.) Is a Certified Agent coming?

We never saw the BTOP and BIP money. Well, ConnectedNation saw the mapping money. This probably hurt gear makers more than carriers.

The FCC got bogged down in Net Neutrality and Broadband Policy without revamping a single thing. I was hoping the "new" FCC would actually do something. Guess not.

SIP Trunking seemed to be all anyone was selling in the VoIP space. Dis-a-ppointing in a Big Way! Why? PRI replacement is like Toll-Replacement -- it's cost savings not productivity improvement. We have all this technology -- and we just can't message it or sell it. (And believe me I have been writing and talking about it all year!)

Amidst all the M&A, we saw Charter, Nortel and Fairpoint file BK (bankruptcy) in 2009.

UC - more people tried to define than use it this year. Just so you know, Telepresence is NOT UC. It's shares components though. Again lots of buzz about this - like there was buzz about HD Voice - neither one likely to hit the big time soon due to the fact that the networks aren't ready yet.

One valuable lesson this year: cheaper bandwidth does NOT mean a good thing. I had many clients get cheap bandwidth - and they got what they paid for.

Lots of outages at data centers too. After Katrina and other disasters, you would think that reliability and redundancy would be the key questions.

Also, so many big data breaches this year, that when you combine it with outages and lack of redundancy, spell a problem for Cloud, Virtualization, or whatever else you want to call hosted server architecture. The highlight would be SalesForce.com reaching a billion in revenue. It sort of proves out the SAAS (hosted app) model.

It was the year of the apps too. Aside from SAAS, iPhone, Blackberry, Google, Broadsoft - everyone got an app store. I don't know if that resulted in revenue, but it probably helped many folks waste a few hours per week. I'm wondering when the IP Phone will become more than just a desktop phone and more like the mini-computer it is today. If you have all these apps on your mobile, why not on your phone on your desk?

This was the year that Twitter took off. I mean, once Oprah got on, that was it. It being the peak. Social media is a time suck without discipline and goals. (Something most people don't have in real life let alone online). Two quick things on social media: it's about conversation and it's just a bunch of software programs that let you publish your message, so engage and be interesting.

WiMax, 4G, LTE - yawn!

Nothing really rocked this year. Did I miss something?

Happy Thanksgiving

The UC Conversation Continues with XO

2009-06-19T12:59:48Z

Tech Data's Senior Product Sales Champion for UC was at the event last night. I spent a few minutes chatting with him about his position, but couldn't really get a definition of UC out of him. Polycom and tele-presence are what he pushes - to me that's not really UC. HD Voice? No we leave that up to Polycom and the vendors. Seems even a tech company has a problem wrapping the head around Unified Communications. (UC doesn't mean the latest gadgets).

XO has some components to build a UC bundle - overlay IVR, Broadsoft SIP Trunking, some straight forward Hosted PBX (with a limited feature set), and Hosted Exchange for the email integration piece.

If the UC Champion thinks UC is tele-presence and video conferencing, what does that say about well defined the term is in the Industry?

Can UC Save You Real Dollars?

2009-05-07T14:39:58Z

We hear a lot about Unified Communications today. UC this and UC that. Even Cloud Telephony and UCaaS. It's kind of crazy.

The main buzz is around the savings from UC. If you have a distributed workforce, then Unifying on a Communications platform with a collaboration module can improve productivity. "IT leaders argue the technology can help businesses increase productivity, cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint," according to a NetworldWorld article.

The productivity gains only come if the technology is easy to use, reliable, and intuitive. By intuitive, I mean, that unlike some CRM and telco software platforms, the software was created with the user in mind and doesn't require a lot of thinking on how to do something. It needs to be like WYSIWYG. "Getting people to change the way they work required his team to pay special attention to training," states Mike Close, CTO of Danone, from the same NW article. Danone rolled out a UC system globally.

Anything done by committee means it will be drawn out and frustrating. The current collaboration software I have seen are really just document sharing applications and some white boarding online. Users need something like Bud Light's Drinkability and Drawing. Maybe a desktop sharing app or white board where everyone can "take control". But I digress.

UC's benefits come from a geographically dispersed workforce or a virtual office setting. It's similar with VoIP. If you are making a lot of in-state calls to other branches, the cost savings from VoIP diminish. When people are working on the same project but aren't in the same building or city, making progress is tricking because audio conference calls, IM/chat and email are one-dimensional. Video conferencing, webinars, document sharing, white boarding - all can lead to productive gains. It isn't a monetary gain per se, but what company doesn't want to be more productive? Plus when you are getting stuff done, employees are more satisfied. No one likes being stuck on the perverbial treadmill.

The carbon footprint is a big issue today. All about Being Green. With video conferencing, especially tele-presence and UC, travel will shrink some. This has a tangible benefit in budget savings but don't discount the carbon footprint shrinkage.

It looks like a lot of the UC hype is based on Productivity gains and time savings, not so much real actual dollars. Aspect rolled out Microsoft OCS globally and is seeing over $1M in real savings. (Read the story here). So there are real dollar benefits to UC if it is rolled out correctly with proper training.

HD Medical Video

2009-02-24T18:55:35Z

Now here's where a niche really pays off.

"Rivulet Communications, whose technology enables flawless HD medical video on the hospital IP network, has raised an $11.5 million round from ATA Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Performance Equity Management and Scorpion Capital Partners... The company won several patents for its technologies, which include its wide-area network Internet Protocol quality of service technology in 2008. ... Its technology helps high priority network traffic avoid bottlenecks, speeding real-time traffic and maintaining video quality. It can be used on existing networks."[TechJournal South]

Tele-Presence and Video Conferencing and HD Voice are services on the growth path, but certainly HD Medical Video is a specialization.

TelePresence with WBS Connect

2009-01-19T18:17:26Z

At the IT Expo West, WBS Connect had a great booth that was a Tele-presence suite - fully tricked out. I interviewed Scott Charter, managing partner of WBS Connect, at the show, but after reading IP Business magazine's write-up, I thought that mine would look like a rip-off.

The key component of the WBS TelePresence offering is that WBS is working on being vendor agnostic or the translator. Right now, Tangberg talks to Tandberg and Cisco to Cisco, but how does Tangberg talk to Cisco's rooms? Using H.264-SVC and WBS Connect as the translator. It's a great way to put all that transit to work.

IT Folks Chatting About Communications

2008-12-09T15:33:39Z

During a discussion online, some interesting items popped up.

Companies ban Instant Message. One IT Security Consultant looks at the irony of it here. Tele-Presence is all about improved efficiency in communicating -- no more phone tag, less voicemail, that kind of thing -- but how will that be implemented in a corporate environment that locks it down?

Social networking like LinkedIn and Twitter are becoming commonplace among the marketing set. Maybe instead of banning these things in a corporate environment, you embrace it and set policy. Here's an article from CIO.com on LinkedIn etiquette.

It boils down to tools. Will you give people the tools that they can use to be effective at their position? If you are that worried about security, do an audit and train your people. Manage by walking around. Most theft is internal or social engineered. You can train against the social engineering, but if someone wants something bad enough they will figure out how to get it. It's just a shame that can't get that passionate and creative about the job.

Tele-Presence versus Video Conferencing

2008-09-09T02:56:30Z

Andy Abramson writes about how video conferencing from a client company like SightSpeed is better than Cisco's Tele-Presence. On Sept. 22, Brian Carroll is having a tele-seminar on "Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting". Keith Rosen, a respected sales coach, would tell you that, especially in today's economic climate, nothing beats a face-to-face or a phone call. Keith writes about how Sales 2.0 is diluting inter-personal communications. (If you have ever received an email from someone that using text messaging a lot, you will see what he means).

As one commenter wrote to Andy, Tele-Presence is a richer experience. Well, it should be for equipment that is in excess of $50K per site. Even this price barrier is being removed by companies like WBS Connect leasing out tele-presence rooms for business use.

Another point is that many tele-workers don't want to shave and dress for video conferencing. There's no IT guy at the home office to help with the video conference set-up. Messing with the webcam and the software is a pain and when you have so much to do in 8 hours, dialing a conference bridge is easy. Even that isn't fool-proof as quite a few times stuff has happened to hamper that easy tool.

Maybe the differentiating factor will be personal interaction. When I see couples at restaurants and one or both are on the cell phone, I have to wonder what are they doing. That's a live person that traveled to meet you. Talk to that person. And the yakking in the car while driving WITH other people in the car. This society is in for a wake-up call and it will come when most of us are too weak to fight back.

You can't get a human on the phone but ChaCha pays humans to run your Google search while you are mobile. Go figure. Maybe the differentiator to a sale will be the personal touch.

Is travel is mess? Yes. Will virtual conferences replace real ones like IT Expo West next week? No. It's about the hand-shake; the meals, drinks and ideas shared. It's about getting a read from someone live. That is not easily replaced. That said, tele-presence as a 3-D meeting experience might work for second or third meetings to go over details or brainstorm or for product demos or training.

Video conferencing like SightSpeed and tokbox can replace phone calls (if we can figure out how to make them on demand like a phone call instead of scheduled). And I need to start replacing some IM and email with the phone. I pay for a landline, a VoIP line, and a cell phone. I need to use it more and the keyboard less.