In recent months LG Electronics, Panasonic and Samsung have announced television sets that allow people to view online content such as videos and photos through an easy-to-use web interface that’s built into the TV. What this also can enable is two way video communications – though the cameras need to be separately purchased from the television.

Earlier this week GIPS held a webinar on the topic ‘Is the Television the next Two-Way Communication Tool?’ If you didn’t have a chance to listen to the webinar, you can always listen to the recorded version. We took polls from the live audience, as what better way to affirm our own research conclusions on the TV as a future two-way communication tool.

We directed 4 polls to the audience and 400 people provided the following results:

As TV audiences have fragmented and evolved their tastes, the television has become less central to the home/family experience.  The evolution of the TV as an interactive device has the ability to take back ground lost as a focal point in the home – recapturing the living room perhaps. 98 percent of poll respondents view the TV as becoming an interactive consumer electronic device and perhaps competing with the PC.

The live webinar audience was a solid mix of broadcast industry professionals, so it was interesting to see their response to this question: Who will benefit most from two-way communication via the TV? There are opportunities for all slices within the broadcast industry but ultimately who will benefit is the user. While we didn’t include the end user in this poll, our assumption was that the TV watcher will ultimately benefit in the long run.

While this next poll would be better directed towards consumers – it was interesting nonetheless to gauge the industry professionals’ opinion.

Finally, we asked the broadcast audience when they see the rollout of interactive programming and TVs. Well it’s already happening and as we discussed in the webinar. Oprah, CNN and Sports reporting are just a few of the places this is already happening.  The times are a changing for the broadcast industry and as Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”

If two recent reports are any indication, video is quickly becoming crucial to enterprise communications. According to a report by Dell’Oro Group, annual revenues for the Unified Communications market will outpace the enterprise voice market through 2014. While there are many important features included in a UC solution (including voice), video is a prominent component that helps differentiate a UC product from one that only includes voice.

In addition, GIPS released a survey last week of 1,200 business professionals in the US and Asia regarding their use of video conferencing, and discovered some surprising results. Among the findings:

-          In three of the four countries surveyed, a majority of respondents had participated in a video conference or video chat.

-          79% of those who use video conferencing technology rely on consumer applications.

-          The most common reason that participants gave for using video conferencing was to communicate and understand others more clearly and effectively.

-          Video delay and freezing continue to be technical concerns for many users.

If you are interested in reading the entire report, you can find it here.

How to Implement HD-Voice Successfully is the subject of our Telephony Online Webinar on Wednesday October 28. Personally I would have liked to use the above title, as it’s very true.

“T’ain’t What You Do It’s the Way That You Do It,” is an old jazz song most famously sang by Ella Fitzgerald in 1939 – about the same time the last improvement was made to voice/sound quality on the telephone.  Never a more true term was said when it comes to HD voice – it’s the way that you do it.

Personally I think HD voice will become de rigueur eventually   – Why would you want to have bad quality when your competitors will offer better solutions? – but trying to cobble a solution together without decades of speech and signal processing expertise is likely to cause a company severe headaches, time delays and frustration not to mention money. So hopefully some of you will be able to join our webinar to learn more about:

• What is actually required for HD voice?
• How do you deal with all the inherent issues of IP networks that constantly effect call quality?
• How do you choose an HD voice codec?
• Case study in HD voice deployment

As a bonus CommuniGate Systems will also join our webinar to discuss their Unified Communications solution, which offers HD voice, for enterprises and carriers.

In-Stat’s analyst Keith Nissen predicts that the HD voice market is expected to grow to more than $3 billion a year. I’d also add that it offers a first-class communication experience with greater intelligibility, comfort and experience without the audio fatigue that conference and telephone calls suffer from currently.

It’s Friday, so I’ll leave you with this version of the song (click image below) from 80’s bands Fun Boy Three and Bananarama because remember: It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It!

There are a lot of acronyms in this industry and it gets to be a bit too much sometimes but Unified Communications (UC) and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) are two well-known acronyms and areas of growth in communications. According to ResearchandMarkets the Fixed-Mobile Convergence market (FMC) “could generate revenue of 900 million EUR ($1.32 billion) in 2013 in Western Europe’s five largest markets, and so accounting for 4 percent of total mobile services revenue.”

So it was great to be able to announce a partnership today with fg microtec who are making waves in the UC/FMC space.

Last week fg microtec (I really like the understated lowercase name) announced a worldwide partnership with Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN) to further develop Siemens’ OpenScape MobileConnect platform.

The OpenScape product family includes open IP telephony, fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and IP-based unified communications (UC) solutions, which will allow Siemens customers to use their mobile phones intuitively with the OpenScape MobileConnect platform.

The fg FMC client will run initially on Windows Mobile devices such as HTC and Samsung. It will allow mobile phone calls to move seamlessly from a cellular to a Wi-Fi network, creating one telecommunications network.

If Google trends are any indication, VOIP security is no longer the buzz word it once was. The initial hysteria can be attributed to the fear of the unknown and adapting to new and unconventional technologies. But with VoIP going mainstream, companies and individual consumers are more comfortable with the technology, and their fears about security are subsiding. However, despite this greater comfort, VoIP is still not totally secure.    

There are a number of security threats relating to VOIP, such as SIP Vulnerability, SPIT, vishing, eavesdropping, and Denial of Service (DOS), the latter of which took down Twitter today. Since VoIP runs on an IP network, it shares some threats and vulnerabilities with other Internet applications, which are addressed by the security precautions in the present network environment. 

As for VoIP-specific security concerns, it has not been an attractive market for hackers for a while. Except for some stray incidents, we have not seen any major breach of VoIP networks. Part of this is due to the complexity involved in creating applications to hack VoIP networks, and part has to do with the changing VoIP product landscape. 

VoIP has transformed into the bigger, more converged product base of Unified Communications. The convergence of unified messaging and communicator segments such as IM, presence, IP telephony, video conferencing, call control and speech control are shifting the security paradigm and creating a new combination of issues.  However, the initial buzz around VoIP security helped companies to be well prepared and address most basic security concerns. In addition, security is addressed at multiple stages of the product chain. For example, GIPS addresses the security of its products at the “engine” level, while companies like Citrix, Avaya and Yahoo re-address it at the end product level.

So in the short term, as new communications products evolve and gain traction, we will most likely not see a lot of VoIP security break-ins.  However, the danger lies down the road, possibly as far off as the next decade.  At this point, current products will be mature and commonplace across enterprise and consumer premises, essentially becoming legacy systems.  This will attract more attention from the hacking world with specific VoIP attacks.  Though UC companies will address some of these security issues in each subsequent product release, the general attitude of the enterprise world will be one of lethargy towards upgrading to the newer installed communications infrastructure.  This will make old versions of products easy targets for hackers, resulting in very real threats in the long run.

You see, UC is a buzz term now. If it’s not the University of California (UC) system grabbing the headlines it’s the other UC – Unified Communications. Thankfully it was a positive note from Infonetics research that showed growth in the industry albeit with the deeply affected global economy. “”The unified communication market did well in 2008, growing 16 percent sequentially… While reduced enterprise spending will be a drag on the market, revenue in the communicator segment, the most important measure of the overall unified communication market, is expected to nearly double in 2009,” said Matthias Machowinski, Infonetics Research’s directing analyst for enterprise voice and data.

I hope he’s right.

Machowinski puts the growth down to the “ability to enable workers to communicate more effectively with mobile and geographically dispersed colleagues, and to integrate multi-modal communication services to help increase productivity.”

According to the bi-annual report Cisco rose in the communicator market from the number 5 spot in revenue market share to number one in 2008, followed by Siemens and Avaya.

On a related note, another survey showed that companies are not slashing their voice communications budget (well at least those surveyed).  Purchase-decision makers at companies using enterprise telephony equipment were asked whether they plan to increase, maintain or decrease 2009 expenditures.

“Ultimately, companies do want to decrease or slow the growth of their overall voice communications expenditures. One item they’re looking at cutting is communication services (long distance, trunking, conferencing, etc.), which takes up the largest portion of the budget. Meanwhile, they’re willing to invest in new infrastructure and applications if it contains or reduces communication services,” stated Machowinski.

Logic would dictate that as networks evolve, bandwidth would become more readily available and concerns about network performance would fade. Apparently this is not the case. According to a survey by network management firm Apparent Networks, IT managers still view latency and bandwidth restrictions as obstacles to Unified Communications adoption. In fact, IT professionals are so concerned about network performance that over one third of those surveyed have delayed a VoIP, video or UC project.

While better infrastructure and more advanced networks are certainly being deployed, it appears as if the allure of hosted services is causing many companies to rely on unmanaged networks for critical communications needs. The distributed nature and cost effectiveness of this approach makes it an attractive one, especially as workers and offices become more geographically distributed, and telecommuting becomes more popular. The approach is not without its drawbacks, however, as unmanaged networks tend to have greater packet loss and delay, as well as bandwidth restrictions. According to Jim Melvin, Network’s President and CMO, “If you think about it, the unique requirement of voice and live video is not just bandwidth but also latency. With video, latency can be buffered, but with VoIP only so much latency can be tolerated.”

More Lanes Might Not Help

Networks are of course going to continue to improve, offering more bandwidth in the short term and opening up a number of communications options that were not possible before. But this only means that bandwidth intensive applications like video conferencing will become more popular, again pushing networks to their limits. Think of any highway expansion project you have ever experienced. Additional lanes probably eased traffic congestion for a while, but in the end, expansion only encouraged more people to move to the area and drive more frequently, resulting in traffic reaching its previously congested equilibrium.

One way to break free of this vicious cycle is to deal with the effects of network degradation at the endpoint. By realizing that bandwidth restrictions and latency are facts of IP communication (at least for the foreseeable future), application developers can design products that offer high-quality voice and video regardless of network conditions. Now if only there were a company out there that developed software that overcame these obstacles.

Last week, Michael Finneran at Unified Communications Strategies reported on a new partnership between HP and Microsoft aimed at claiming a larger stake of the UC market. According to an announcement at Interop in Las Vegas, the companies will invest $180 million in professional services, joint marketing, and tighter integration between HP hardware and infrastructure, and Microsoft software.

The move seems calculated to challenge Cisco for UC supremacy, so it should come as no surprise that Cisco today announced efforts to beef up its UC offering.  The world’s largest networking company will roll out new IP phones, provide expanded WebEx service and allow easier access to technical support. 

Cisco’s most significant plans, however, include expanding Telepresence support and tighter integration between video conferencing platforms. There has been a lot of talk about whether Microsoft or Cisco will be the dominant player in the estimated $34 billion UC market. Cisco has a stranglehold on the networking and telephony space, while Microsoft is the unquestioned leader in enterprise software. As communications become more unified, these worlds begin to overlap. Microsoft’s strategy to this point seems to be to partner with hardware/ infrastructure companies (HP and Nortel) that round out their offerings, while Cisco appears to be acquiring software vendors to provide desktop solutions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in videoconferencing, with a focus from both camps suggesting it is the frontline of the UC battle. HP already challenges Cisco in the telepresence space with its Halo solution, while Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx in 2007 signaled it was serious about desktop conferencing and collaboration.

Cisco’s acquisition strategy would seem to indicate more control of innovation and technical roadmaps, possibly coming at the expense of time-to-market.  On the other hand, as Finneran points out, the key for HP (and really any company Microsoft partners with) “will be to make the whole more than the sum of its existing parts”. While each strategy has its strengths, the winner of the UC battle may ultimately be determined by who offers the best conferencing solution.

Two pieces of recent news seem to indicate that VoIP and Unified Communications are benefiting from efforts to tighten belts. This is a topic that has received quite a bit of attention already, but it is noteworthy that the phenomenon appears to be taking place in both the home and the workplace.

Over the weekend, the Boston Globe ran an article comparing various residential VoIP services. It surveyed the gamut of options, from PC applications like Skype and pure-play VoIP services like Vonage, to offerings from cable/telco companies such as Verizon. While the article could have been written about 3 years ago, what seems to be pushing the topic to national consciousness is the need to save money on home phone service. The piece clearly recognizes VoIP as a solution (perhaps the solution), and helps everyday folks not familiar with the industry navigate a crowded landscape.

Perhaps even more intriguing was the release of a report from Frost and Sullivan on web conferencing and collaboration.  The report claims the market for services from such companies as Citrix GoToMeeting, WebEX and On24 is expected to double by 2014 and reach revenues of $400 million. Among the driving factors, economic uncertainty seems to loom large.  Companies are looking to reduce travel expenses, and UC solutions can deliver the kind of interaction that would otherwise require face to face meetings. Furthermore, the SaaS model has proven stable enough that companies are comfortable going with more cost-effective hosted solutions to meet their collaboration needs. Finally, technical hurdles have been overcome to deliver reliable, high quality voice and video applications.

I have read a few articles recently proclaiming Unified Communications the answer to the spread of swine flu (yes, I know the media are supposed to be using its official name, H₁N₁, but 1) just because I publish random thoughts on a geeky corporate tech blog does not mean I am part of the “media” in any formal sense 2) I am not going to take direction from the pork industry, and 3) swine flu reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes of all time) and can only think people might be stretching a little.

Don’t get me wrong, as any of my coworkers can attest, I am a huge advocate of staying out of the office when you are sick. And you need read no further than my last post to know that I fully support working from home.  However, the media reaction to swine flu has been predictably hysterical and I think any association with the disease borders on capitalizing on fears that are largely unfounded. I could be wrong, and this could turn out to be a global catastrophe, but as it stands right now, I don’t see any need to start marketing technology in response to what amounts to a new strain of a disease we are all familiar with.

In other news, anyone interested in HD voice should register for our May 5 webinar on the topic. Presenters and guests include:

• Tobias Kemper, Head of Communications &SocialMedia, Nimbuzz
• Jeff Pulver, Serial Entrepreneur
• Jan Linden, VP Engineering, Global IP Solutions
• Joyce Kim, Chief Marketing Officer, Global IP Solutions