Fujitsu Voice and Data, Jim Clarke:

Videocall have given us the right blend of service and support. Videoconferencing is about an experience and ensuring that Fujitsu personnel get this experience every time is very important. To this end Videocall is a company big enough to meet our needs while remaining agile and personable in responding to our requests.

In 2003, Fujitsu integrated video conferencing into their daily business to reduce costs on travel, improve employee and customer work-life balance and also to improve their carbon footprint. Today, Fujitsu uses video conferencing services on a daily basis and has 222 systems deployed through 22 sites of the enterprise.

Videocall CEO, Rob Portwood:

Fujitsu Services is a long standing Videocall customer and over the years the relationship has developed well. With this latest upgrade to a high definition telepresence style experience Videocall look forward to being able to meet Fujitsu Services’ video communication objectives for years to come.

Polycom Vice President, Joe Sigrist:

The use of visual communication is growing because it effectively addresses major collaboration issues inherent to distributed, enterprise organizations as well as critical business challenges driven by globalization, socio-economic factors and the move toward more environmentally sustainable business practices. Our customers are looking to deploy video more broadly across their organizations from telepresence rooms to mass scale desktop video collaboration. The RMX 1000 supports this as part of Polycom’s comprehensive solution portfolio for visual communication.”

The RMX 1000 and RMX 2000 media servers are optimized for high-performance video conferencing communication. using technology based on open standards, the solutions enable multipoint video conference calls across different network environments and between different types of video devices, transcoding the various speeds and protocols to provide the optimal experience to each system based on the capabilities of the systems in a call.

The RMX 1000 supports HD video, HD content sharing and high quality audio which offers the benefits of both enhanced clarity and stereo surround sound which separates voices when multiple parties speak simultaneously. Like the RMX 2000, the RMX 1000 supports secure online conferencing through AES media encryption and provides an optimal experience even on slower networks with Polycom’s Lost Packet Recovery technology, which minimizes the damaging impact of network congestion and packet loss on the video conference call experience.

Multimedia Educational IT Specialist, Mark Crowl:

The RMX 1000 is a great high performance, multipoint platform for distributed video networks as well as a solid solution for small campuses. Set up was easy — we had the system up and running in under an hour — and we put the bridge through its paces, including cascading calls between the RMX 2000 and RMX 1000. The on-board management and scheduling capabilities are intuitive, and the HD video, content and audio quality is great and well suited for our distance learning and tele-medicine applications.

For small and medium-sized enterprises the RMX 1000 is a cost-effective solution for bringing high-performance multipoint video conferencing capabilities in house. The plug-and-play platform is easy to deploy and contains on-board capabilities for centralized scheduling and management.

Appearing at the event via video conference link in London, Dr Pachauri said reducing business travel would cut aviation emissions. In many developed countries, air transportation represents 40% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. Pachauri:

One important contributor to this source is the growth of civil aviation across the globe,” he told MPs. A focused effort to shift business travel for conferences and meetings of all types to video-based communication would be of great benefit in reducing and controlling the growth of emissions from aviation. I therefore endorse the concept and practice of video conferencing as an important substitute for business and conference-related travel in the fight to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

A report published in May claimed 89% of FTSE 350 companies expect to reduce flights in the next ten years and 85% see video conferencing as a way to help achieve that goal. While the rise in fuel costs is the main reason corporations are reducing physical travel and replacing it with video conferencing services, many of them are also concerned about the environment. Shifting to video conferencing in the short term reduces travel and indirect costs, while protecting the environment is a long term problem that many individuals and corporations are realizing needs to be dealt with today.

The new global gateway will provide users the ability to easily place high-definition video conference calls between users on different networks. The service could be used for HD interviews in lieu of travel to a remote location, pointing to a key reason so many users are turning to webcasting and video conferencing: rising fuel prices.

WBS Connect claims it will bridge disparate HD video conferencing systems for customers from hardware manufacturers such as Polycom, Tandberg, Cisco, and LifeSize. The company said it currently has a presence in carrier-neutral data centers in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Miami, Newark, Seattle, London, Toronto, and Amsterdam.

WBS Connect Managing Partner, Scott Charter:

Telepresence and video conferencing is the killer application for the 21st century.”

Virtual In Person high-definition video conferencing and telepresence is new to WBS Connect. The company’s existing services include IP transmission, Content Delivery Network (CDN) services, data center co-location services, and consulting. It also manages web-based scheduling and a user-centric Video Network Operations Center (VNOC), which it said helps ensure successful videoconferences.

Intellicon Director, Chetan Turakhia:

The system is set to redefine ‘electronic meetings’ greatly enhancing the ‘human factor’ into video conferencing sessions.

Vega X7 is able to independently manage the bandwidth available, automatically adapting the video coding parameters to maintain high definition. Offering the real-time audio and video conferencing, this tool offers the possibility to connect up to nine different multiple locations.

Today, networking giant Cisco proudly announced the installation of its 500th telepresence room. The Cisco telepresence room is essentially a room dedicated to video conference meetings, however it’s unlike any videoconference you’ve ever been in.

The room has a semi-circle table for your local members to sit at, and three high definition screens that simulate the other half, completing a virtual round table. The directional cameras and microphones allow you to directly address an individual on the remote end of a telepresence room. People that have tried this technology claim that it is very much like meeting in person.

The technology isn’t cheap. The six person telepresence installation will cost you $300,000, and you need two of them to complete the circle. The Halo system from rival HP can cost up to $350,000 and Polycom’s RealPresence can cost $200,000. There is also the cost of the bandwidth — you will need a dedicated 10-15Mbps connection between telepresence rooms, which could cost between $8000 to $10,000 a month per site.

Currently the prohibitive costs limit telepresence to wealthier companies that currently have a large travel budget. As installation and bandwidth costs continue to decrease, web conferencing via telepresence could all but eliminate the need for future business travel.

Accessibility, adoption and quality were determined to the three most critical success factors to having a successful roll-out of an HD video conference strategy by participants in the research. The study also indicated that serious corporate thought is required to assure that the service becomes imbedded into the corporate culture and work processes.

“Even with a focus on the Critical Success Factors, executives should review a few other Considerations to enhance the value of the investment,” said Brockmann.

The report is available for a limited time for free download at http://www.brockmann.com

LifeSize Communications, a provider of high definition video communications products, has announced a new high definition video communication system. The LifeSize Focus integrates a high definition camera and a microphone array which is now available for $4999.

Compact, simple and elegant, LifeSize Focus features a HD video camera that delivers full HD 1280 x 720 video at 30 frames per second. Built to operate in any office or conference room environment, the camera delivers outstanding image quality in a wide range of light conditions. An integrated two-microphone array with beam-forming technology provides excellent sound quality. By integrating the microphone array in the camera housing, LifeSize Focus saves space and eliminates clutter.

The LifeSize focus is ideal for new users seeking a audio and video conference system, or companies expanding and upgrading their current infrastructure to high definition. By reducing cost and complexity, LifeSize said its video conferencing systems can be deployed almost anywhere, by anyone. LifeSize Focus is simple enough for anyone to use, yet it can be fully managed and integrated into the more sophisticated IT infrastructures found in large organizations.

LifeSize.com