Video is big business or not

There is no denying that video is the application driving the buildout of IP backbone networks today. What is less clear, however, is the extent to which video is becoming a table-stakes application in the enterprise world.

“I don't think we are seeing that much growth in video usage,” said Dan Dacosta, head of telephony marketing for Orange Business, which provides enterprise services globally. “On the public Internet with YouTube and things, sure, but on the private network, I don't see corporations using video to any great degree.”

In fact, many businesses are trying harder not to allow broadband services to be consumed by the video-watching habits of their employees, said Michael Adams, vice president of systems architecture for Tandberg Television, soon to be part of Ericsson. Tracking software aimed at employees' personal use of the Web can target video usage, he said.

“Businesses aren't using video as much, although that could change,” he said. “In the case of business, typically they are looking to combine their PBX voice services, and of course, a lot of them are going to [voice over IP] as an alternative to PBX.”

One reason business video isn't as widely used today is that most collaboration that is done over the Web doesn't require fact-to-face communications, Dacosta said. “From what we see, video is not the growing application for collaboration. It's more about Web conferencing and voice using different media and shared white board,” he said. “I think this is because when you think about how people work, the importance of seeing that person — physically seeing them and their face as they talk — is not so critical for most applications.”

Some service providers believe that change may be at hand, especially as high-definition technology gets cheaper and become more widely deployed.

“We are seeing [business video] as a significant driver for things like metro Ethernet services,” said Pieter Poll, chief technology officer for Qwest. “Businesses are saying, ‘Can I get around having people travel from A to B by improving the experience in video conferencing?’ They will start to include high definition, with a high-quality picture, not a Webcam with a 240×360 window and 15 frames a second.”

Concern for global warming also factors into the equation, said Suraj Shetty, senior director of ISP marketing for Cisco Systems, which is making major investments in creating TelePresence systems — essentially life-sized teleconference facilities that seek to recreate face-to-face meeting conditions.

Service providers can use TelePresence technology to create their own service, he said. Real-estate developers also are using TelePresence for their customers in office buildings, he added.

“But we are not even seeing the knee of the curve,” Shetty said. “We think with global warning, travel is having a huge impact. TelePresence helps some of those kinds of issues. But I don't want to call it teleconferencing because it is maintaining the integrity of the experience of across-the-table discussion. You can almost have actual conference room experience while the person might be thousands of miles away.”

In fact, Cisco, which wired every one of its cubes and offices with IP phones in the late '90s, is now “going through the same transition with TelePresence,” Shetty said.

HP and even smaller companies such as start-up Telanetix also are selling TelePresence systems.

Venture-backed Virtela, which provides IP business services globally as a virtual network operator, sees an uptick in business video without the full-room, high-end conference.

“There is definitely an increase [in business video], and on our side, it looks like companies who are consultative in nature,” said Kathy Lynch, senior product manager of video services for Virtela. “We focus more on customers who have specific communities of interest where we can control the end points.”

For example, she said, a major multinational bank connected more than 2000 desktops using Avistar Communications Web-conferencing video. “It was almost a video IM-type of service between the bank, its internal locations and its trading partners,” Lynch said. “They thought it actually facilitated the communications between internal employees and their partners. The bank even saw productivity increasing because they didn't have to walk to each other's offices to conduct business.”