Polycom launched its new cloud offering, RealPresence Cloud, yesterday with great fanfare. This is significant as Polycom became the last of the 3 major video conferencing vendors to throw their full support behind a cloud offering of their own.

The RealPresence Cloud offer provides Polycom-based services without the need for network infrastructure (e.g., bridges, gatekeepers, session border controllers, gateways, etc.) on the part of the end users.

What’s different from the Polycom offer vs. their competition is that it clearly states it is a wholesale offer to be sold through the service provider community and not directly to end users. By contrast, the Cisco Callway service and LifeSize Connections services are sold directly to end customers potentially competing with their own service provider channel partners. This alternative approach is understandable from a Polycom point of view in that they have a much larger installed based of service providers on the VoIP handset side and have always feared not being seen as neutral.

Now that all three of the major vendors have launched their own cloud services, the idea of cloud video conferencing has rapidly moved from a good idea to a must-have mainstream service for the industry.

Having said that, I see a number of deep flaws shared by all three vendors in their collective approach.

For starters, all of them focus their offers around their own technology. The Cisco offer only supports Cisco equipment, LifeSize for LifeSize, and Polycom for Polycom. This worked reasonably well for these players when their sales were directly at small, largely internal-only deployments at the Fortune 500. But SMEs are going to want to speak with others outside their organization. And those other companies will have a mix of other solutions that might include the same equipment but also would surely include some that deploy the Big Three.

Additionally, many SMEs regularly use consumer-oriented video conferencing services like Skype and Google to name a few. In order to really make these cloud offers valuable, the network of potential called parties needs to extend from a handful of internal conference rooms to the billions of people who use their laptops, tablets, and smart phones (mostly on the consumer platforms like Skype) every day.

And finally, the pricing of these cloud services is still very similar to the “white glove” video conferencing vendors who target larger enterprise customers who are relatively price-insensitive when the boss is considering the option of Learjet or Telepresence room call. SMEs strive for the higher enterprise-grade quality these vendors can provide but are not willing to pay the same stratospheric prices.

Vidtel addresses all of these offering limitations through a vendor-neutral service that integrates the enterprise systems with consumer ones (like Skype and Google) at prices that are an order of magnitude lower than the big guys.

So thanks to Polycom and their fellow competitors for stepping up to the cloud world. We are thrilled to have you join the cloud party and make this a must-have for the mass market.

For too long, the small-medium enterprise (SME) market has effectively been squeezed out of business video conferencing with solutions that are either too expensive or too low in quality. Vidtel’s cloud video conferencing service is designed to change all that. To reach our target market, we are linking up with channel partners that already have SME relationships. We’re partnering with video equipment vendors, VoIP service providers, managed service providers and video VARs to re-sell Vidtel service.

Our channel program supports the sales of MeetMe, the any-to-any video conferencing service that provides SMEs with a flexible, cost-effective and high-quality middle ground.  With Vidtel’s MeetMe Video Conferencing Service, video conferencing vendors, AV integrators, VoIP providers and managed service providers can offer cost-efficient and predictably-priced hosted, any-to-any videoconferencing services that work with room-based systems and executive video systems using SIP and H.323 as well as desktop platforms, PCs, tablets and smartphones using Skype and Google Talk. MeetMe enables users to participate in multi-party, multi-vendor (e.g., Tandberg/Cisco, LifeSize, Polycom, InFocus, SONY, Google Talk and Skype) video conferences.

Vidtel’s channel program benefits video vendors, VoIP providers, managed service providers and VARs by providing additional sales opportunities with new and existing customers. Selling Vidtel MeetMe enables our partners to:

Expand the Customer Base

MeetMe is cost-efficient and eliminates one of small-medium enterprises (SMEs)’ biggest barriers to adoption: The steep upfront cost of video conferencing infrastructure. Vidtel’s cloud approach means that there are no upfront expenses on infrastructure, no maintenance expenses and no IT expertise needed. Companies that would have never considered business-grade video conferencing due to the lack of suitable products and services targeting the SME market can now get in the game.

Upsell to Existing Customer Base

VARs can upsell service to customers who already own room-based and executive video conferencing systems.  MeetMe’s compatibility with diverse video platforms and technologies means that customers can leverage their existing video investments by connecting with employees, business partners and customers that use what otherwise would be incompatible platforms.

Drive Complementary Sales

MeetMe’s device-, vendor- and platform-agnostic architecture, along with its cloud-based design and multiple pricing options, provide SMEs with a combination of flexibility, affordability and predictability that encourages wide-scale video conferencing deployments. The savings free up capital for investments in other areas, such as LAN/MAN upgrades and additional endpoints.

Vidtel’s MeetMe service is available in North America with expansion plans for Europe and Asia. To become a channel partner, contact channels@vidtel.com.

By Mariette Johnson Wharton, VP of Marketing

With the accessibility of video conferencing and video chat at the desktop level, more and more business people are experimenting and gaining comfort with the technology. With this experience comes greater demand for ease of use, performance and interoperability.

No longer are small-medium sized enterprises willing to let only the big guys with special rooms purpose-built for video conferencing have all the high-quality video conferencing fun.  Fortunately, an emerging trend is the decreasing price of business-grade video conferencing devices.  The latest $20,000-$40,000 telepresence systems are dramatically lower, but still way out of reach for mid-sized and small companies. The 55-inch touchscreen-enabled wall tablet (Mondopad) announced last month by InFocus fills the void in the market with a sub-$6,000 pricetag. Now smaller companies do not have to get shut out of high-quality video conferencing because they can’t afford the equipment.

One issue people often don’t address is that even though the large enterprises spend a fortune on HD room systems, these pricey solutions are still primarily used for internal connections. It’s just too difficult to navigate the complexities of interoperability between proprietary systems and even standard systems (maddeningly, various vendors interpret standards differently).  Seamless connectivity presents tremendous challenges, from firewall traversal to interoperability between the multitude of video technologies (from consumer services such as Skype to executive video phones to room systems by various vendors).   Companies need session border controllers, SIP proxies, gateway servers and specialized know-how to pull it off.

Most companies have never even heard of the infrastructure required for weaving together video conferencing technologies and we don’t believe they should have to.  We agree with Martin Vilaboy:  The answer to widespread SMB deployment of business-grade video conferencing lies in a service provider solution “that can deliver affordable and robust hosted services”.  Our hosted (think SaaS model) video conferencing service puts our “secret sauce” for interop and our video conferencing server infrastructure in the cloud so the SMBs can access it as a monthly fee.  This means on-demand interop between everything from Skype and GoogleTalk to the Mondopad and Polycom, Tandberg, LifeSize, etc.  We made it as simple as dialing a phone for point-to-point connectivity or as easy as an audio conference call for a group video conference (just dial in).  This will allow companies of all sizes to finally experience high-quality any-to-any video conferencing between companies without IT hassles and exorbitant expenditures.

Vidtel, a cloud-based video conferencing service provider and CommX, a technologically savvy service provider of hosted telephone systems for businesses, today announced their distribution arrangement to market Vidtel’s hosted Meet Me Video Conferencing Service for multi-party conferencing to CommX’s national customer base of hosted voice business customers.

Many small-to-medium-sized enterprises find business-grade video conferencing highly desirable but also highly challenging to implement. Barriers to implementation include high infrastructure costs, video conferencing expertise and device interoperability issues. CommX and Vidtel have partnered to deliver a hosted solution that even the smallest enterprises will find accessible. Vidtel’s hosted video conferencing service removes IT hassles and expenditures on infrastructure and enables interoperability between 90% of standard video conferencing equipment (e.g., Cisco/Tandberg, Polycom, LifeSize endpoints). With this outsourced solution, SMBs have no need to acquire additional expensive infrastructure to initiate a business-grade on-demand multi-party video conferencing call with third-parties.

“CommX is well-known for moving ahead of the curve on technology evaluations and trends in the hosted VoIP market, and was an early pioneer of VoIP implementations. We are enthusiastic about working with CommX to deliver our service to its national customer base,” said Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel.

“The Vidtel hosted service solves a major problem for small to medium-sized businesses who seek business grade, multiple point video calls. This offer radically expands the addressable market for HD video conferencing and it dovetails with our existing hosted voice offers. Vidtel is a leading edge player in this space and we’re excited to be working with them,” said Mike Viren, CommX’s CEO.

The CommX Meet Me Multi-Point Video Conferencing service is live and commercially available through CommX channel partners.

CommX is an early Voice over IP (VoIP) pioneer, founded in 2002 after the core team had performed significant testing/evaluation of numerous early VoIP platforms developed by BroadSoft and other softswitch companies. Funded entirely by its employees, the CommX organization worked hard to build its customer base in the early stages of the VoIP market, focusing on the Tampa Bay and New York City area business community. This disciplined effort provided invaluable experience that would help the company make a strategic move three years later, when it began delivering wholesale VoIP to business partners in other markets. More information is at www.commxinc.com.

Vidtel is a cloud-based video conferencing service provider. Our open video conferencing network service provides compatibility between a diverse set of business-grade video endpoints at enterprises worldwide. Vidtel enables even small and medium enterprises to experience the productivity of secure, high-quality video conferencing with partners, suppliers and customers around the world. Vidtel is located in the heart of Silicon Valley in Mountain View, CA. Find more information at http://www.vidtel.com.

Scott Wharton is at BroadSoft Connections October 25-27 at the Arizona Biltmore.  To set up a meeting with him there, contact him at 650-353-1010.

A report in July-August 2010 Channel Vision Magazine (circulated to nearly 20,000 channel partners and wholesale carriers selling voice, conferencing, IP and other network-based services), points to the growing demand for video conferencing outside of purpose-built room systems.

In the magazine’s “Beyond the Conference Room” report, Martin Vilaboy argues that video outside the conference room “gets really interesting only when sessions can be initiated across all types of endpoints, from telepresence flat screen to an iPad in a hotel room, and vendor brand names attaches to services and endpoints don’t make a difference.”  That, and it’s an easy to use, on-demand service. “Only at that point,” Vilaboy maintains, “does it truly become accessible for SMBs to routinely collaborate with partners, customers, mobile workers, suppliers, etc. At this point, for an SMB to achieve interoperability on its own, it would require tens of thousands of dollars in network investments and some degree of IT resources.”

Even though the major video conferencing vendors have made advances towards standards and cross capabilities, seamless connectivity still presents what Vilaboy terms “significant challenges” including firewall traversal and a “market landscape, from Google to Cisco, of proprietary platforms and technologies.”  In the report, Vidtel CEO Scott Wharton notes that even when standards are established, it can be hard or impossible to get them to work together since the SIP standard is an interpretive one, meaning interpreted differently by various vendors.  This is too much for the average SMB IT department and even the video VARs to handle so they tend to recommend that customers stay with one vendor’s brand and use it for internal use only.

The key to widespread SMB deployment of business-grade video conferencing will be a service provider solution “that can deliver affordable and robust hosted services”, Vilaboy reports.  Outside of a hosted solution, SMBs would have to invest in gateways, session border controllers, service bridging, and SIP proxy functionality.  Then, there are cases where SIP needs to be integrated with H.323, which is not a simple matter.

Ugh. Most SMBs don’t even know what those terms means, nor should they have to (we think).  As an alternative to SMBs undergoing this infrastructure investment, cloud-based service provider Vidtel put all this functionality in the cloud and offers a hosted service for a monthly fee.

Our approach seeks to have SIP, H.323 and proprietary video conferencing systems all work together.  The Vidtel network also has the capability of integrating with the PSTN so local phone numbers can be used for regular phone calling as well.  Multi-point is easy, too.  The bridging function hosted in Vidtel’s data center enables multi-party video conferencing.

Vidtel pursues a channel strategy to deliver service and has announced deals with hosted voice providers to integrate the Vidtel multi-party video conferencing service.  Vidtel’s SIP core enables the hosted voice providers to use SIP trunks for bridging to Vidtel. End-customers then dial into the bridge on-demand with a 10-digit number from their Polycom VVX1500, LifeSize Passport, Tandberg E20 or other standard device.

The Channel Magazine report begs the question of how long the lower quality and lack of support of software-based consumer-oriented video conferencing solutions will be tolerated by businesses. Research Now’s study demonstrates that audio quality is as important as the video experience. “With user expectations raised by the popularity of HD everything,” the report quotes Research Now, “video conferencing or video chat without HD voice and HD video usually results in poor user experiences.”

PC-based solutions are limited by processor speed, Wharton points out. It’s the same reason people prefer to watch movies on TV vs. on a handheld device – better processing capability provides better quality.

As video device prices are shrinking and hosted solutions become more available, HD video conferencing will come more into the hands of the SMB market. “Endpoint prices are starting to come down, ” Wharton is quoted, such as from LifeSize, Cisco/Tandberg, Sony and Polycom. “What’s not coming down is the complexity or the need for someone to manage things in the middle.”

All of this is good news for Vidtel.

Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC, asks Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel, about Vidtel’s cloud-based video conferencing service. Scott discusses the vision of the company to provide HD video conferencing for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs).

The Vidtel service enables SMEs to have business-grade video conferencing without investing in video conferencing infrastructure (e.g., session border controllers, gateways, SIP proxies).  Vidtel is device-agnostic, enabling any SIP device (e.g., Polycom, Cisco, Tandberg, LifeSize, Sony) to register to and connect with others over the Vidtel network.

Vidtel’s approach is to provide a hosted service, similar to a telephone monthly service fee, eliminating the need for customers to invest in additional IT support, servers, testing and interoperability.

To gain new customers, Vidtel is pursuing a channel strategy with video conferencing vendors, VoIP providers and and VARs.  Vidtel’s service allows VARs and VoIP providers to expand their hosted voice offerings to include hosted video.

In the case of the major video conferencing vendors, Vidtel helps solve the problem of these vendors’ niche focus on the large enterprise. Teaming up with Vidtel enables these manufacturers to address a much wider audience. Without a hosted service such as Vidtel, potential customers would be required to make substantial IT investments to accommodate HD video conferencing.

What’s next? Vidtel has already enabled interoperability between the major players’ equipment (Tandberg, Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize and Sony).  H.323 to SIP  interoperability is next.  Vidtel’s vision also includes gateways from SIP devices to proprietary standards (e.g., Skype, Google, Microsoft, Apple).

See Scott Wharton interviewed on TMCnet.

By Mariette Johnson Wharton, VP of Marketing

In TMCnet’s VoIP Quality Feature, industry expert Doug Mohney outlines the troubles facing end-to-end SIP transport and the need for what he terms a ” federation service to link enterprises, enabling them to share UC applications, IM directly and securely, and do all that HD voice and video goodness without having to run down to the corporate IT staff and getting them to hand-craft secure connections through the firewall on a one-off basis.”  His view is that, “federation would provide a central hub and one-stop-shop for businesses to interoperate at the applications level without having to worry about security.”

Businesses are considering how they can seamlessly integrate UC applications with their partners since Internet service providers (ISPs) do not offer such a service beyond the controlled VoIP framework.

Those of us in the video conferencing industry have been anticipating a Polycom reaction to Cisco’s fall 2009 announcement of its acquisition of Tandberg, the leading video conferencing equipment supplier.  Today we await no longer.

Tensions have been on the rise with the severance of the Cisco-HP reseller arrangement, the Tandberg acquisition and Cisco’s increasingly aggressively focus on telepresence (the fastest-growing business unit in the firm’s history). What was Polycom to do?  Polycom today announced that it’s teaming up with HP to drive interoperability of its video conferencing and telepresence systems with HP Halo telepresence.   Under the arrangement, Polycom’s video and voice solutions for unified communications will be sold and delivered through HP’s Unified Communications and Collaboration Services portfolio.

HD Voice News profiles Vidtel, an innovative video conferencing service provider, as leading the charge for HD video conferencing device interoperability.  Industry expert Doug Mohney writes:

“…With the trending-upward use of HD voice in the VoIP environment and enterprises looking at their big-bucks telepresence systems and wanting to use them to videoconference (vconf) with their business partners (i.e. suppliers and customers), Avaya, Cisco, Polycom and others need some answers.

Vidtel (www.vidtel.com) is the most “on the radar” company when it comes to enterprise federation [interoperability]. CEO Scott Wharton has been leading the charge to build a video directory and other interoperable bits to allow video-endpoints to directly call each other over the internet without having to deal with the Grand Headache of corporate IT -  having to customize a peer-to-peer link.”

By Mariette Johnson Wharton, VP of Marketing

In a business environment, most people are looking for not only business-grade video and audio but more than 2-way video conferencing. Up until now, companies would have to buy an expensive video conferencing bridge and then risk exposing bridge credentials to third parties if they wanted to include partners or customers in their video conferences.

There’s also the problem of interoperability. You may have a system from one vendor and seek to connect to a third-party with different technology.  Today, very few small-to-medium-sized enterprises have sufficient in-house resources for business-grade multi-point video conferencing. The equipment and know-how required is too resource-intensive for most organizations.

Vidtel now has a Multi-Point Video Conferencing Service that addresses these problems. It’s a cost-effective, hosted, outsourced solution that a business of any size will find accessible.  Vidtel’s multi-point video conferencing service lets you video conference with multiple, external parties without having an expensive bridge to maintain.  We solve the interoperability problem by integrating various video conferencing endpoints.  We manage, upgrade and configure secure multi-point video conferencing bridges, co-location facilities and the network.

The Vidtel Multi-Point Video Conferencing service provides even a small business with:

• Instant 3-way (or more) high-quality video conferencing without spending thousands of dollars
• A ten-digit number and PIN to easily dial in to a bridge
• Firewall access for remote workers and third-parties
• The ability to be at your desk or home office and simply dial into a video conference from your “desktop” video phone

Vidtel has teamed up with SimpleSignal, a visionary service provider of hosted telephone systems for businesses (http://www.simplesignal.com). Vidtel’s multi-way video conferencing service integrates SimpleSignal’s BroadSoft® BroadWorks® application server with Vidtel’s video conferencing service and Polycom® VVX^TM 1500 business media phones. The service enables three or more VVX 1500s to connect via a simple dial-in number for instant multi-way video conferencing.

SimpleSignal will market Vidtel’s Hosted Multi-Point Video Conferencing Service to SimpleSignal’s hosted unified communications customers beginning in Q2 2010. Visit http://www.simplesignal.com for information on subscribing to the service.