Johannesburg, 29 Apr 2010
Companies are fast adopting conferencing capabilities because they have significant impact on the business. A recent survey indicates that companies are adopting conferencing technology as a way to improve productivity and control costs.
Many of these organisations are turning to new software-based conferencing and collaboration solutions for audio and Web conferencing, as well as continued face-to-face conferencing via video.
An integrated hosted conferencing solution can save up to 95% of the costs of using separate audio, video, and Web conferencing, and a premise-based unified communications (UC) solution can save as much as 97% when compared to using separate hosted service providers for an organisation's conferencing needs.
Galdon Data director Garry Ackerman points to recent market research that indicates that audio, video, and Web conferencing are all seeing tremendous growth in terms of total use and frequency of use. “The number of bridged audio conferencing minutes increased by 55% worldwide between 2006 and 2008, approaching nearly 60 billion minutes.”
“Furthermore, the number of named end-users for premise-based Web conferencing solutions increased by 48% during the period to reach 31 million, and the total number of business video endpoints sold increased by 43% to 235 000, of which a significant and growing number are high definition (HD). Clearly, conferencing use is skyrocketing in the enterprise, and it is providing real business impact.”
Many companies are turning to premise-based solutions because they provide much faster access to people and groups, they are presence-enabled and also offer instant, ad-hoc multi-modal conferencing capabilities. Furthermore, the better solutions also offer excellent voice capabilities that may replace the enterprise PBX, which could provide significant additional savings.
With a UC solution, people can instantly click-to-conference using voice, video, Web, or any combination of them. In summary, either the hosted or premise-based fully integrated conferencing solutions provide the most attractive total cost of ownership (TCO), each of them offering to reduce typical conferencing costs by 90% or more.
Microsoft has been a leader in the development and deployment of software-based UC and conferencing solutions, and the company has developed two deployment options for their conferencing solutions, along with a variety of clients and devices upon which enterprises can rely to meet their conferencing and collaboration needs.
Microsoft Office Live Meeting is a full-featured hosted UC (voice, Web and video) conferencing service. Users access the solution via a Web browser over an Internet connection. A simple browser plug-in is usually installed, although not required, to provide a better participant experience. Microsoft Office Live Meeting delivers all of the capabilities one would expect in a modern Web conferencing platform, including the ability display presentations, documents, browsers, and any application.
Live Meeting also offers whiteboarding, and it gives participants the ability to mark up and annotate any document. The Live Meeting hosted service also provides an excellent platform for events or large numbers of participants in a Web conference. The Microsoft Office Live Meeting Client provides access to both the hosted and on-premise options.
Using Microsoft's IP audio capabilities, Live Meeting participants can join a Web conference using their computer microphone and speakers, and for video, they may use a standard Web cam. Attendees will enjoy excellent audio quality, even over an Internet connection. Users may also join the audio portion of a meeting using a regular telephone.
Ackerman says one of the unique features Live Meeting offers is the ability for users to deploy a portable Polycom CX5000 conference room audio and video speaker device. “Polycom CX5000 captures a 360 degree image of everyone in a room, and transmits it to participants at other locations. Using Polycom CX5000, meeting participants can see the body language of everyone in the meeting, making meetings much more effective, particularly for meetings involving non-native language speakers and those in multicultural environments. Polycom CX5000 also supports wideband audio, providing participants with a richer, more enjoyable audio experience while meeting.”
Software-based audio, video and Web conferencing capabilities are native to OCS 2007 R2, and the product can support hundreds of simultaneous audio and/or video conferencing sessions. OCS 2007 R2 allows companies to eliminate the service fees charged by hosted audio and videoconferencing service providers, allowing significant conferencing cost savings. It also offers additional audio conferencing functionality to include dial-in users from the PSTN.
For more information, contact Galdon Data on (011) 805 4420 or e-mail sales@galdon.co.za.
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