VoIP Evolution Report Dispels SMB Video Conferencing Hype

Serious excitement surrounds the SMB (small to medium-size business) video conferencing space these days. In June and July alone, no fewer than eight companies – 8x8, Blue Jeans Network, BroadSoft, InFocus, LifeSize, Polycom, Telesphere and Vidtel – announced new hardware, services, tie-ups or some combination thereof. All of the announcements represented significant investments of time, effort and resources. And together, they indicated a widespread optimism that the market is about to take off.

Even in pre-takeoff mode, though, the market has already spawned a hefty body of conventional wisdom. Most of it takes the form of ardent convictions surrounding clouds and interoperability. One of these is the belief that cloud solutions are the ideal way to meet almost every SMB video conferencing need. A related one is faith that providing interoperability is the surest route to success for cloud providers. A new VoIP Evolution report, SMB Video Conferencing: Getting Beyond Clouds & Interoperability, both explains why it's necessary to get beyond such conventional wisdom, and provides a method for doing so.

On one hand, there's little doubt that the cloud-based approach to video conferencing has major advantages for SMBs. In particular, it eliminates the need for major upfront spending and expensive technical expertise. But simply offering a cloud video conferencing solution is not necessarily a slam dunk. Non-cloud approaches have their own advantages. And cloud services can have significant disadvantages, in part because they often vary little from premises-based enterprise systems. Ignoring these realities increases the possibility of providers' offering solutions SMBs don't want.

Similarly, to a casual observer, it seems a great idea for providers to claim that their solutions allow anyone to hold video conferences with anyone else. But the technical complexity of the issue is such that any level of interoperability among users, networks or devices comes with lots of exceptions. Trying to gloss over these exceptions raises the risk of customer backlash.

The VoIP Evolution report identifies eight key factors that differentiate video conferencing solutions from one another. Each factor represents a decision providers and their customers must make in developing and choosing solutions. The cloud and interoperability decision are only two of them. That fact alone makes clear that overemphasis on the conventional wisdom limits one's ability to understand the market.

More important, each differentiation decision affects others in complex ways. Thus only by examining all of them in context is it possible to understand the importance of specific decisions, including those involving clouds and interoperability, in determining the suitability of different solutions in different situations.

The report surveys 10 Companies to Watch: 8x8, Blue Jeans Network, BroadSoft, InFocus, LifeSize, Polycom, Telesphere, TokBox, Vidtel and Vidyo.

It also compares 16 cloud-based video conferencing services: 8x8 Virtual Room/Virtual Office; Blue Jeans Network; BroadSoft BroadCloud Video; Cisco WebEx; FuzeBox Fuze Meeting; Google Talk Video Chat; LifeSize Connections; Nefsis; OnSIP; ooVoo; Skype; Telesphere VideoConnect; TokBox OpenTok; Vidtel Connect and Meet Me; ViVu VuRoom; and VSee.

Further information about the report is available here.