I had the pleasure of moderating an end user panel at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) School of Technology's VOIP Conference & Expo yesterday. As often happens with these end user sessions, the discussion ranged widely, and I thought the most interesting comments were made about video in the enterprise.
Kevin Delaney of Huron Consulting Group, aptly described his company as "bandwidth-blessed," with more than 30 Mbps of WAN bandwidth on one link. Huron describes itself as a company that "helps clients in diverse industries improve performance, comply with complex regulations, resolve disputes, recover from distress, leverage technology, and stimulate growth." According to Kevin Delaney, that means that building relationships with clients is paramount, which makes Telepresence not just nice to have, but really essential in establishing the sense of trust that Huron requires with clients in distant places that it's not feasible to meet with in person as often as they'd like.
Meanwhile, Bill Gay, who handles internal technology deployments for Aspect Software, based in Lombard, IL, said he had observed a pattern when it came to desktop video: Teleworkers tend to use it the first few times they deal with someone, then just don't bother any more, once the sense of relationship is established. When you're working on a collaborative process with a colleague, there's no need to see them sitting at their desk in their home office, "with their gym equipment in the background," he said.
The issue of cost savings got a bit of discussion going, with Bill Gay and Huzefa Mustady of Tellabs' internal IT department describing a similar scenario of consolidating multiple vendors' systems into a more cohesive environment with IP telephony, saving some money in administration. Bill Gay conceded, however, that the vast majority of the savings that Aspect experienced came from bringing audioconferencing in house to an internal bridge and dropping their service providers--a prosaic but sure-fire ROI-maker for the past several years for lots of enterprise.
We were also fortunate to have Walt Magnussen of Texas A&M University on the panel. Walt discussed his attempt to find a cloud-based service to succeed the traditional Centrex that A&M had run on for years; he said he tried for 2 years to find a service provider that could meet A&M's needs with an IP offering, but couldn't find anyone. "It wasn't going to work unless we were willing to relinquish 100% of the control," Walt said. Lots of enterprises would be reluctant to lose that much control; it's especially an issue for a college, where technology decision-making tends to be very decentralized and departments get to make most of their own decisions.
As far as the cost goes, Walt said the hosted solutions came in at around $10-12 per month per endpoint, while CPE came to about $13.75, though the hosted figure didn't take into account the inevitable cost of managing the hosted provider.
There was also discussion of Skype; Kevin Delaney said that since Huron handles clients in the medical vertical, it has no choice but to rigidly enforce a ban on Skype, since Skype offers no way for IT to control or even know about what information is leaving the enterprise.
Walt Magnussen added an interesting point about Skype. Universities are a hotbed of Skype use, where tech-savvy users are frequently connected to family or colleagues in other parts of the world. Technically, A&M has to ban the use of Skype on university computers, for an intersting reason: The Skype terms & conditions require users to let their computers be used as nodes in the Skype cloud for transport; since A&M's computers are property of the state of Texas, users are not authorized to enter into such a contract for use of state resources on their own initiative.
That's in theory; in practice, Walt said, it's been very hard to enforce. Furthermore, the university has no ability or desire to restrict Skype usage on students or staff's personally-owned computers.
