Dennis Sandow chuckles recalling his “Halo moment.” It occurred when an illusion created by the video conferencing system he was using made it seem that a colleague was in intimate proximity, even though they were thousands of miles apart.
“He didn't have his pen,” says Sandow, a social scientist who studies collaboration and human interaction and performs contractual work for Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Halo video conferencing system. “So, he looked up and said, ‘Dennis, do you have a pen I could borrow?' And I reached for it to pass it over.”
A second later, with Halo's illusion broken, the men shared a laugh but the point, Sandow stresses, is that removing barriers to social interaction is the key to video conferencing success.
Slow, cumbersome, artificial and exorbitantly expensive when it lumbered onto the landscape nearly two decades ago, video conferencing is evolving as a vital collaborative tool for a diverse range of applications, from multinational corporations to health care, and even the arts.
The University of Waterloo, for example, uses it to allow actors and directors to collaborate on projects all over the world while also delivering live theatre to wider audiences. The National Arts Centre in Ottawa uses video conferencing to export Canadian culture across the country and to the world. “This is not your grandmother's video conferencing tool,” says Halo marketing manager Ray Siuta of the system, which can connect up to four studios around the world simultaneously. “It's about creating a distraction-free environment for business.”
Video conferencing is becoming a natural extension of telephone conferencing or e-mail, adds Laura Shay, marketing director for Polycom Video Solutions, the biggest player in the video conferencing world with others like Tandberg and Sony close behind.
It's also a growing market. In 2005 video conferencing was worth about $1.15-billion (U.S.) globally, says Roopam Jain, an analyst with ICT Frost & Sullivan. The market is expected to reach $3.1-billion by 2010, growing at a compound annual rate of 22.1 per cent. Research firm Gartner Inc. is even more bullish on the sector, projecting video conferencing technology to be worth $12.8-billion by 2011.
“We see healthy but gradual growth in this market as the technology becomes more intuitive and is integrated with other communication tools and enterprise applications,” Jain said.
“It really cuts down on the time it takes for a decision, you get the right people meeting right way and it cuts costs,” enthuses Guy Welty, manager of global media networks and collaborative services for W. R. Grace, a global chemical supplier with annual sales of more than $2.5-billion and 6,400 employees in nearly 40 countries.
Welty manages nearly 90 video conferencing points of varying sophistication around the world and says bringing the system in-house over a unified communication system saved $5.5-million over outsourcing for both audio and video conferencing last year. Managing the resources and booking conferences is as simple as using Outlook, he said.
“We have one big one here in Columbia, Maryland, that the CEO uses for town hall meetings that are recorded and archived. It cuts travel costs and saves time. Sending two high-level executives to Asia is two days each of downtime with the travelling. This is much more effective.”
Video conferencing hardware and software runs the gamut of complexity and price. While consumer level systems go for as little as $50, the quality is reflective of the price. Polycom's more sophisticated desktop system is $200 and runs at 30 frames a second, enough for smooth motion but still subject to some lag or latency. Still, the low entry price makes it a worthwhile experiment, especially at the rank-and-file level for employees working in distributed or virtual teams in far flung locations.
The next step up is a $5,000 system with an integrated camera and screen. From there systems evolve into dedicated conference rooms starting at $25,000 and soars to $500,000 for top of the line systems designed for lecture halls or other large meeting rooms. As the prices rise, so too does the level of sophistication and illusion.
