Musings from ITEXPO East

At the show, one of the first things that happened was that several people asked me about the Apple patent on video conferencing on the iPhone. At the time I hadn't seen anything about it but after a quick look at the patent it was clear to me that the patent only covers touch screen capabilities. I.e., there is nothing in the actual patent claims about video conferencing. I provide a few more details in a post on the GIPS blog.

On the first day of the conference I was part of a panel discussion with the title "Collaboration & Telepresence as Part of a UC Strategy". The session was well attended and several interesting discussion topics were brought up by the moderator and the audience. There was a clear consensus that the ROI of video conferencing and telepresence is easy to calculate and that most companies will see those returns within 12 -18 months. One part of the discussion I found particularly interesting was related to the the less tangible benefits of video conferencing and collaboration. In addition to pure ROI in terms of reduced travel cost the less tangible benefits include increased efficiency. The questions that were asked were how do you measure such gains and how do you put it into the ROI calculations before making the investment in a new solution? Unfortunately, it seems like this is really hard and nobody had a great answer to those questions. However, as pointed out by the panel, since the ROI on travel cost alone looks very attractive these additional benefits don't have to be included in the initial ROI calculation.

On Tuesday I participated in a very interesting lunch panel. The topic wideband (or HD) voice and the session was entitled  "HD - What's the noise and are we ready?" Look out for a video of the panel that will soon be available on TMC's site. This is a topic I am very passionate about. GIPS has been a strong advocate and may I say a trailblazer in terms of deployments of wideband speech solutions. Hundreds of millions of users are currently using GIPS' iSAC, the most used wideband codec in the world. The success of wideband for desktop solutions is very obvious but the main question raised was related to how and when will HD voice be on our regular phones and mobile phones? More specifically someone asked: When will 50 % of the cell phones have HD voice? Everybody were reluctant to make any bold predictions but someone on the panel answered ten years. I not only hope, I am pretty sure it will be much shorter than that. I predict that Europe and North America will be there in less than five years. Another key questions raised was: How can we get users to demand HD voice? The answer is in my opinion found in the expression "hearing is believing". If you experience true HD voice you never want to go back to PSTN quality again. Some concerns regarding the number of wideband codecs available and interoperability issues were also brought up. Considering that the number of available wideband codecs is significantly less than the narrowband codecs I am not worried about this issue at all. There is a need for several codecs for different usage scenarios and only the appropriate codecs will survive.

My last presentation was on the topic of VoIP enabling the iPhone. Clearly this is a topic that interests a lot of people and I got a lot of interesting feedback. In short my message was that high quality VoIP exists for the iPhone today but a few challenges remain. The main ones being the lack of support for running applications in the background and the fact that VoIP over 3G is not allowed.

A pretty clear theme throughout the conference and the show was SIP trunking and more specifically interoperability (see SIPconnect) of SIP solutions. SIP trunking is obviously nothing new but it is pretty clear that the vendors and (a few) service providers are trying very hard to get this technology deployed. In my opinion, few things in this industry makes more sense than removing the enterprise PSTN gateways and replacing them with SIP trunking gateways. It has always troubled me that the vast majority of VoIP implementations in the enterprise are terminated directly to the PSTN already at the enterprise itself. Unnecessary transcoding and delay are just some of the issues. Stay tuned for more on this topic in a future post.