Disaster Drives Video
The big news of the week is Nortel filing for bankruptcy in the US, Canada and Europe. Nortel has $2.4 billion in the bank and by filing for bankruptcy it will “preserve its liquidity and fund operations during the restructuring process.”
According to Nortel their normal day-to-day operations are expected to continue without interruption and the company has even stated that its commitment to the Winter Olympics in 2010 and the Summer Olympics in 2012 remains unchanged.
While it is never nice to hear about any company going bankrupt – Nortel’s technology is still considered sound. As Forrester analyst Henry Dewing said: “They’ve got great technology and customers…”
On another note, an article in Forbes caught my attention today, ‘Betting on Telepresence.’
As Wainhouse research stated last month video conferencing may well escape the worst effects of the economy. One data point to support Wainhouse research’s belief is Polycom’s announcement of its anticipated 4th quarter results: “Solid year-over-year growth with a slight sequential decline in video solutions revenues, driven by slight sequential growth in network systems and solid year-over-year growth in video communications.”
Polycom’s Chairman and Chief Executive Robert Hagerty said: “disasters drove the video conference business,” 9/11, SARS and now the global economic slowdown.
While there is demand on the high-end of video (telepresence or high-definition video), there is also a significant market for video on the desktop. As my colleague Niklas wrote yesterday – there is an amazing video experience achievable on the desktop. With HD video available on the PC – not every company needs to think HD-video conferencing systems costs $100 – $500K.
The current video conferencing offerings still have vast room for improvement and at GIPS we’re constantly developing real-time video processing to make sure the experience is not a disaster.
Tags: Video Conferencing
