FEATURE: UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS The right connections


Steve Montgomery investigates the evolution of videoconferencing and telepresence into unified communications – and the collaborative features that are becoming available to enhance business activities


Polycom’s RealPresence Group Series offers a simple user interface and low total cost of ownership


[KEY POINTS]


Unified communications has been enabled by the increase in processing power and network bandwidth, coupled with the massive proliferation of personal devices in the business environment


UC incorporates the ‘triple-play’ of voice, video and data communications between single and multiple users on any device of their choosing


UC achieves true data collaboration and has the potential to fundamentally enhance an organisation’s business processes


Microsoft Lync provides the core functionality for UC systems and requires additional services, supplied by vendors, to provide true business systems


Systems may be hardware-, software- or Cloud-based. Each approach has merit for specific installations


VIDEOCONFERENCING, AND more latterly telepresence systems, have been available to – and in many cases underused by – large organisations since the 1990s. The first installations generally required large, fixed ‘suites’ in which participants would engage with similar set-ups at a remote location. High capital cost, lack of compatible target systems and low network bandwidth held back their deployment for some time until, in the 2000s, most of these limiting factors were overcome and the technology became more popular. In recent years they have


evolved further through the greater availability of high bandwidth networks, mobile computers, better compression technology and the greater abundance of low- cost screens and cameras. Videoconferencing became more user-friendly and available, appearing on desks and in general-purpose meeting rooms. As Andreas Wienold, vice


26 April 2014 ‘We are on the


cusp of a far more extensive and


immersive video communication


strategy globally’ Andreas Wienold, LifeSize


president for Europe and EMEA at LifeSize, observes: “More of the processing and management is being performed in software rather than hardware, and


videoconferencing systems can be installed easily in multipurpose rooms already with their own displays rather than in dedicated suites. The cost of installing a high-quality HD videoconferencing end point in a presentation room can be as low as €5,000, rather than the €50,000 required a few years ago. This makes it available to a wider range of smaller companies. We are on the cusp of a far more extensive and immersive video communication strategy globally.”


The latest stage in this evolution is unified


communications: a technology enabled by the recent explosive increase in processing power and network bandwidth, coupled with the massive proliferation of personal devices in the business environment (often under the corporate Bring Your Own Device [BYOD] strategy). Unified communications has


various meanings, but in its broadest form is generally accepted to cover the ‘triple- play’ of voice, video and data


communications between single and multiple users on any device of their choosing. This may be provided as a proprietary hardware-based solution or an on-premise software one and may even be provided as a Cloud-based service.


“Unified communications incorporates true data collaboration,” explains Martin Finlayson, European product marketing manager at Imago Group. “Participants using unified communications are able to work together on a document; annotate and add to it. Unified communications incorporates techniques that are more familiar in the social networking and instant access world, like instant messaging, presence detection, contact profile display file sharing: tools that contribute to a user’s personal workflow and create a single profile across multiple devices.” One of the key attributes of unified communications is that it is platform, network and device agnostic at the user level and is extremely


simple to use. Users expect the same sort of experience in their business activities as their social and personal interactions – in many cases using the same devices. The range of devices is expanding rapidly, and with it the overheads of manipulating the video and data so that it can be seen on all these devices correctly. The need for scaling and the number and types of codecs have become an issue for technology providers and IT departments. At the same time there is the additional complexity of the user simultaneously operating several devices and their desire to be able to answer and interface with the unified communications system on any one of them.


BUSINESS CRITICAL The issue here is that unified communications has the potential to fundamentally affect an organisation’s business processes. It is something that lies at the heart of the way they operate, interact with clients and,


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