Travel budgets are being squeezed - gone are the days of
leaping on the nearest plane and flying first class to have a
two-hour meeting on the other side of the pond. However, top-end
videoconferencing suites, although highly effective, are not
widespread as yet, generally due to the high costs of
tele-immersion systems, and the need for dedicated rooms and
managed high-bandwidth connections,writes Clive
Longbottom, service director atQuocirca.
For most people, daily collaboration generally involves a quick
discussion and the sharing of information, For example, one person
based in London may want to show a colleague or customer in New
York what they have been working on. E-mail may work, or it may be
too slow, may introduce misunderstandings or complex round-robins
of communications.
Simple videoconferencing, of the likes of
Skype or
Windows Live Messenger may be OK for one-on-one discussions,
and where lack of complete video image and video clarity is not a
major issue.
Video conferencing for SMEs
But what about when you want to bring together a virtual team of
people to collaborate over an item? Can you bring multi-point
videoconferencing with sounds and screen sharing together in a way
that works, at a price point accessible to small businesses?
The problem here is that there are hundreds of small companies
that state that they can do some or all of what a user could be
looking for. From on-premises systems, through hybrid hosted/thick
client models, to in-the-cloud models, there seem to be so many
webconferencing, videoconferencing, teleconferencing and screen
sharing companies out there that it has become very difficult to
see the wood for the trees.
In such a crowd, the differentiators are not necessarily the
quality of the video stream (important though that is), but rather
security, pricing, client software design and so on. One company at
least is worthy of being highlighted, as it appears to offer a few
differentiators worth a look at.
VSee is a US-based company with a
relatively simple system that covers a lot of bases for many users.
Multi-point video is covered, and advanced algorithmic codecs
working in the background ensure that the best possible video and
voice quality is maintained during a call.
Any specific window or a complete desktop can be shared between
people in the call, and control can be handed over as necessary for
others to add comments and mark up on the original screen.
So far, so good, but these points in themselves hardly set the
world on fire. What else can VSee offer?
Security
How about very solid levels of security? Its
customer
base includes the sort of groups that should not be mentioned
in polite conversation, with an increasing number choosing VSee
purely for its security capabilities.
How about its extremely low footprint? Although a hosted model,
VSee is not dependent on downloading multi-megabyte clients that
may, or may not, work successfully on the client machine.
How about this contextuality of connectivity capabilities? VSee
recently ran a
system
for the UNHCR where a refugee camp in Chad was able to
participate in a full video conference with the US, without the
need for any special hardware or bandwidth.
VSee's business model is that each user needs a VSee account,
which has a quoted cost of $50 per user per month.
And herein lies the rub. VSee makes the greatest sense for
relatively small organisations, but the pricing model does not
attractively scale.
Let's look at a 10 user organisation: 10 licences at $50 per
month = $6,000 per annum. Only one first class trans-Atlantic
ticket, sure, but still a lot of money to stump up for an
organisation of that size. When this is combined with the problem
that few video conference systems are capable of interacting with
each other, the perceptional issues may be too much in these
circumstances.
As video conferencing is not just a tool for communicating with
fellow employees, but rather one that gains value in line with
Metcalf's
Law, it would be nice to see a pricing model that rewarded
existing customers for encouraging other businesses to sign up too.
One existing VSee customer could enhance the penetration of VSee in
the marketplace by encouraging the business partners with which the
VSee customer needs to communicate with to also sign on to using
the technology.
Free trial
VSee does, however, offer a
30-day free
trial, so that organisations can see if works for them. As with
most vendors, there are savings to be made for quantity purchases,
but this is obviously something for individual negotiation.
It is also a relatively small and nimble organisation, and
states that it is always looking at its cost models, which may mean
that there is a degree of flexibility in how such organisations
could draw up a subscription agreement.
But, in a world where remote collaboration is becoming
increasingly important, VSee is worth looking at: you can even look
at it with a VSee employee on the other end if you want to try it
for real.