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What Greater Social Responsibility Is There Than Climate Change? Last year I participated in Blog Action Day and promised myself to make it a tradition. After all, the purpose of Blog Action Day is to create a discussion, and focus the energy of bloggers and readers on an important issue.

This year, the subject chosen is “Climate Change”, which is, of course, tightly coupled with Video Conferencing in any discussion/news story/marketing pitch. Well, I do intend to talk here about Video Conferencing and Climate Change, but I promise not to bore you again with the usual “video conferencing can save the environment” chit-chat.

Instead I would like to discuss why video conferencing is NOT yet a suitable replacement to business travel, why I can relate to executives who are still not satisfied with their video conferencing systems. And this is Business-to-Business video conferencing. Or should I say the lack thereof.

B2B?  BRB!

A few months ago John Bartlett wrote a great piece on NoJitter about the compatibility issues of Business to Business (B2B) video conferencing. As John mentioned although some vendors are enabling cross-organization video conferencing connections, successfully breaking the boundaries of traditional video conferencing (and telepresence), the big picture is still pretty grim.

There are many issues that currently prevent the video conferencing market from declaring B2B conferencing as a problem successfully solved:

• Inter-connection: while physically remote hubs of an organization are usually connected via dedicated connections (such as MPLS), inter-organizational connections are usually done via the Internet, where bandwidth and QoS are not guaranteed. This dramatically affects the video quality, unless handled correctly by both parties.
• Protocols Interoperability: most vendors in the video conferencing market use H.323 or SIP (usually both are supported). In the telepresence market this is not the case – most solutions are proprietary and use proprietary protocols. This means that interconnecting between systems may require gateways to translate between protocols, which are currently not available for most organizations.
• Codec Interoperability: The interoperability issues regarding protocols are also relevant when trying to connect single-codec (“regular” video conferencing) to multi-codec (“telepresence”) systems.
• Dialing Plan: While in pure voice telephony (PSTN), there is a single, global dialing plan, there is no matching scheme for video communications. Lacking such a scheme, ad-hoc video dialing between organizations is wishful thinking at best.

As my colleague Stefan Karapetkov wrote on his blog, proprietary solutions and interoperability issues “create islands in the communication market that cannot communicate with the rest“. The solution to the interoperability problems is simple: standardization. Simple but not very feasible, as interoperability may jeopardize the business plans and market strategies of some (if not all) of the relevant parties.

In other words, dialing from one business to another, assuming both parties are using video conference capable endpoints, is quite a gamble. No wonder executives and other employees are feeling better betting on audio conferencing.

Don’t you have video on your side?  I’ll have to get back to you on this one.

Bridging Between Islands. CC: mashafeeg

What To Do?  Do!

You know the math: more virtual meetings, less environmental pollution; and less pollution means less effect on climate change. For the video conferencing industry, to truly position itself as “green”, there’s quite a distance to go. It may be the last mile, but this one is quite a breather.

In a recent Point9 Europe event, Andrew Davis of Wainhouse Research talked about “Using Videoconferencing Beyond the Corporate Network”. In his presentation he talked about the objectives that should be met for B2B video conferencing to really work:

• Quality should be uncompromised, even when the network is unmanaged.
• Functionality should not be compromised, even in B2B calls.
• There shouldn’t be any barriers to access when calling B2B.
• Ease of use should be the focus in B2B as much as intra-organizational calls.
• Affordability of the B2B solution is key

In layman’s terms, this means that:

• Technologies for maintaining a high quality experience over unmanaged networks (mainly the public Internet) should be developed and deployed.
• Interoperability should be regulated. This should include not only protocols and codecs, but also functionality.
• There should be a “global” directory that will allow users from different organizations to connect, just like with the Plain Old Telephone System (POTS).
• And while solving the above, ease of use and affordability should not be sacrificed. Meaning that complex “hacks” and expensive gateways should be avoided.
• Last but not least, one should remember that we are still talking about opening the “walls” of an organization to the outside. Any solution must be well secured.

As you can see, this means there’s LOTS of work to be done. But I guess there isn’t a worthier cause.

With Social Responsibility Comes Profit

One can argue about the financial benefit of such work, which will enable competitors to talk to one another. I guess there are two answers to this argument —

On one hand, video conferencing will never become a real means of communication, until inter-organizational communication will be achieved. And I don’t see anyone (not even Cisco-Tandberg… ) totally dominating the market.

On the other hand, I truly believe that by “saving the world”, a little, corporations can gain their profit. There are many studies that show that social responsibility leads to financial success, and that if corporations obey social responsibilities, moral choices will yield significant financial profit in the long run. And what greater social responsibility is there, for our industry and in general, than climate change?

Our social responsibility in the near future is to solve the B2B Conferencing conflicts, even if they seem to be working in our benefit in the short term. Then, and only then, can we argue that people should use video conferencing and not travel.