Telepresence + Interoperability: A winning equation?

At a time when most businesses seem to be cutting back, it’s hard to imagine major investments in upgrading video communications. Some vendors and service providers say it’s happening, in large part because companies see the value of a one-time investment in videoconferencing gear versus daily or weekly flights to distant locales.

Would it happen more quickly if videoconferencing were as easy as, say, picking up the telephone and calling anyone you choose? Of course. That’s not possible today because most video services are islands of connections defined by a service provider and an equipment vendor.

Polycom today took one step toward enabling its customers to connect to one another by using the Glowpoint Telepresence interExchange Network — a point of interconnectivity that addresses issue such as network address translation and firewall traversal, which today keep IP-based video systems from talking to one another. But even in making this announcement, Polycom officials agreed that service providers are the ultimate answer to interoperability.

This will be the challenge if telepresence is to truly take hold as a widely used service. The communications enterprises value most highly are those with customers and partners. In today’s IP-based video world, that’s only possible if everyone has the same service provider and the same equipment vendor. The Polycom-Glowpoint partnership addresses half of that equation but not the other significant issue.

While some video vendors are more standards-based than others, none of the current vendors — Cisco, HP, Tandberg, Teliris, Polycom, etc. — offer true interoperability or even seem headed in that direction. And at some point, that will become an issue for the proliferation of high-end video systems.

Service providers are not much better. They like keeping their customers on their networks and not sharing that business with competitors.

Polycom believes this initial step may prove the value of interoperable systems and nudge service providers to consider opening up to more interoperability, which in turn would put pressure on vendors to create solutions that interoperate. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.