Service Provider Spurt
A huge spurt in demand has come from service providers. Led by Reliance, in the last three years the market has seen a surge in popularity for public rooms providing hosted videoconferencing to individuals as well as corporate clients. Reliance provides retail videoconferencing services from 241 Reliance World outlets across more than 105 cities in India. By end 2006, the company boasted a customer base of 750 in the managed videoconferencing space with plans to increase it to 1,000 by 2007.

While the trend had been sparked off by Reliance, over the last one year service providers have started offering videoconferencing services as one of the mainline value added services from their kitty. It is estimated that in the coming three to four years, service providers owning these public rooms will upgrade their infrastructure, pushing demand for videoconferencing endpoints as well as infrastructure equipment.

During FY 07, an interesting trend in the service provider space has been the emergence of videoconferencing endpoints bundling strategy as part of enhancing their value added offerings. Customers are willing to purchase a bundled offer rather than going in for individual conferencing services.

Toward High Definition
The guiding theme of technology trends in FY 07 was moving towards high quality. There has been a shift toward high definition videoconferencing driven by telepresence, multi-party conferencing using hardware MCUs, and recording and streaming solutions.

HD is a new technology and the trend has started taking shape in India. Till early 2006, there was only one company, LifeSize, with a working solution. LifeSize launched the first HD offering in late 2005. Today, the rest of the players in the videoconferencing space have recognized the customer demand for high definition and are now in various stages of bringing their products to the market. While manufacturers like Polycom, Tandberg, Aethra and Sony have been operating in the Indian market for sometime, LifeSize Communications, providing high definition videoconferencing solutions, made its entry into India almost at the same time as it launched its products worldwide. This immediately differentiated manufacturers as those with high definition (HD) solutions and those with only standard definition (SD).

The Telepresence Effect
Telepresence emerged as a major driver for HD conferencing and attracted attention in the Indian market in FY 07. The telepresence phenomenon emerged as a very high quality audio/video/sensory communication alternative to traditional videoconferencing. More emphasis will be laid on conferencing with life-size displays employing high definition video and audio. Some of the high definition telepresence applications include business meetings, telemedicine, distance learning, and corporate training.

A highlight was Ciscos launch of its telepresence meeting solution. This includes ultra high definition 1080p video, imperceptible end-to-end latency, and wideband spatial audio. As the telepresence category grows, Cisco will develop additional applications tailored for specific industries like healthcare, retail, banking, entertainment, and government. This could include a doctors appointment, a virtual specialist for providing in-store expertise, remote interviews or depositions, or getting in touch with grandparents without the need for travel. The system requires major bandwidthof about 12 Mbps for a three-screen setup.

As Indian companies increasingly go global and global MNCs continue to grow in India, one will see significant investments in converged communications technologies like telepresence.

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