Video has gone from being a sidelight at VoiceCon to being an integral part of the Enterprise Connect event. That's not just because more people are using video communications both in their work and personal lives, but because many enterprises would like video to become integral to their own communications infrastructures.
There are a lot of reasons why integrating video with your UC systems makes sense, and for the last couple of years, Brent Kelly of Constellation Research (and, previously, of Wainhouse Research) has helped lead our sessions on integrating UC and video systems. Brent's going to build on his recent Orlando presentation in an Enterprise Connect webinar this Wednesday, so if you weren't able to be in Orlando, you should check this out.
In his presentation, Brent offers four key advantages for unifying voice and video call control:
* Reduced management overhead
* Consistent dialing with phones or video
* Video inherits bandwidth management and call admission control
* Blend multi-channel communication modes easier
There are multiple issues you'll have to deal with as you try to make this integration a reality--much of it centered, not surprisingly, on dealing with the voice and video systems that you already own and will continue to have to maintain as legacy systems, even as you transition to a more holistic environment.
It's as much in the voice vendors' and network managers' interest to do this, as it is for those in charge of video. You can see that they recognize as much by their own eagerness to associate themselves with video. Cisco, obviously, blazed this trail years ago, but now most of the rest are getting on board--Avaya with its purchase of Radvision and Siemens with its promotion of a new video conferencing device at Enterprise Connect last month.
I want to call special attention to Brent's third bullet point, which emphasizes the ability to better manage bandwidth for video and to use call admission control to ensure video quality. I recently argued in Meet the New Internet, Same as the Old Internet, that unmanaged, non-QOS IP networks, aka the Internet, might wind up being the default choice for all real-time networking. But if you're at all interested in providing assured video quality, you will need better controls.
Furthermore, you may wind up with a corporate mandate to get a handle on video traffic. This weekend's story about Procter & Gamble banning Netflix and Pandora from its networks is in a slightly different category, as it deals with streaming traffic rather than interactive, but the motivation is the same one that enterprise managers may find themselves facing with regard to two-way real-time traffic--avoiding excessive bandwidth consumption.
(By the way, Greg Wolf of NetForecast has done some great posts for No Jitter recently on the impact of streaming sites in general and Netflix in particular.)
Brent is joined on this Wednesday's webinar by Terry Robinson of Avaya; the session is entitled, "Taking the Mystery out of Enterprise Video." I hope you can join us.
