“Call completion is important for driving the adoption of video in larger organisations; if the person they are calling is away from their desk, the call needs to automatically divert so it can be taken on the recipients’ laptop or mobile.
Usually, larger organisations have the resources to manage and deploy infrastructure and software to support these features, or work with an existing integrator or service provider to provide them. SMBs don’t own a lot of the infrastructure, so there is a lot of opportunity for the Channel to provide managed services. At Tandberg we are seeing a lot of our Channel partners already doing this.
SMBs demand ease-of-use and so they are jumping straight to laptop mobile devices using Tandberg’s Movi, C20 or Microsoft OCS with a managed service; enabling them to make a lower investment but reap all the functionality of video. However, larger organisations also use desktop systems like TANDBERG’s 1700 or video-VoIP phone, the E20, and invest in the infrastructure to manage these.
If a reseller or integrator has competence in a particular market, then they should stay there. The desktop and mobile video market is poised for significant growth so they should concentrate on adding that vertical messaging to the benefits that video can bring – mainly enabling businesses to do more with less, accelerate decision-making and be greener.
Tandberg is seeing significant adoption of desktop and mobile video in all sectors, driven by the need to do more with less. We’ve significant pick-up in the public sector but also in the manufacturing industry, where companies need to communicate efficiently and effectively right across their global distribution supply chains.
There’s a lot of excitement around video right now and market conditions mean it is the perfect time for companies to invest their precious IT budget into projects that guarantee rapid ROI. So, there is definitely an opportunity for those resellers and integrators entering into the VC market but, make no mistake, deploying video to the desktop and mobile requires a large degree of competence and investment in training.
Both Tandberg and other VC vendors are looking to make sure they have partners that have significant capability, especially when developing mobile integrated solutions. With a massive interoperability drive in the market, those resellers and integrators with skills in Microsoft OCS and IP telephony are very well placed.
We strongly believe at Tandberg that if everyone knew what video could do, they would all want to use it. There are three conditions though: quality needs to be absolute, it needs to be accessible to everyone, and it needs to desirable. Quality requires strong, robust, open, scalable infrastructure and that is not a mass market deliverable solution. However, vendors need to work together to offer open standards; for instance people wouldn’t by a mobile phone today if they couldn’t call other mobile phones!