Meetings are a fact of life for just about every organization, but holding them live and in-person can be a serious drain on time, budget and productivity.  Video conferencing is commonly viewed as a logical way to reduce travel costs and add a powerful visual element to long-distance voice conversations.

In the past, enterprise-scale conferencing has focused on room-based, multi-screen tele-conference studios located at key office locations.  While impressive, such systems are also cost-intensive to acquire and complex to use.  And with the emergence of the distributed workforce, many remote employees do not have access to corporate conferencing studios – even though these users would benefit most from conferencing!

Fortunately, emerging technologies make it possible to “think small” and position video-conferencing closer to the user for unprecedented levels of adoption.  Conferences are moving from multi-screen studios to desktop and laptop computers, smartphones and tablets – where the distributed and mobile workforce increasingly does business.

Vendors are innovating in the area of new desktop and mobile conferencing applications, and the new generation of systems and clients features higher scalability and a proliferation of choice, all at a lower cost.  SIP-based video systems provide a robust and standardized protocol for cross-platform conferencing.  Innovative deployment models – including cloud, as-a-service and managed-services – further reduce technical requirements, network bandwidth requirements, and costs.

SPS partners with several industry-leading manufacturers of video-communication systems, including Avaya Radvision, Polycom, Cisco and LifeSize.

• Several top platforms are making strides by integrating video systems and endpoints that the customer already owns.  Avaya's Radvision exemplifies this, enabling seamless conferences with clients ranging from multi-vendor room-based systems to tablets and smartphones.
  
  
• Polycom, a long-time leader in the conferencing industry, provides a broad portfolio of room-based hardware, supporting a range of conferencing models from simple video to immersive tele-presence.
  
  
• Cisco (Tandberg) also features a broad and mature set of offerings, scaling all the way up to three-screen tele-presence studies featuring its “business-class” touch-screen experience.  Cisco solutions also integrate well with portfolio stable-mates WebEx and Jabber.
  
  
• LifeSize is focused on expanding the variety and range of its conference clients in the handheld to small-room range – illustrating the trend toward a desktop or handheld conferencing experience, and away from room-based studios.

Contact SPS to discuss how conferencing fits into your overall Unified Communications strategy, and find out how next-generation systems can provide your distributed enterprise with an accessible and affordable videoconferencing solution.