2009 marks tipping point for IP video

VBrick CEO shares his views about IP video

VoIP, unified messaging, products and services

This week, we turn our focus back to video over IP (or what we call IPV) starting today with some insights provided by Vince Graziani, CEO of VBrick Systems. VBrick started to offer IPV in 1997, and has over 60,000 video appliances and products installed with over 5,000 customers. In a recent interview, Graziani shared his views about the increasing need to engineer corporate networks for video first and data second. He also shared a user case story to illustrate the business case for IPV.

We started our interview with Graziani by asking “when is the tipping point to engineer for video first and data second in the corporate network?” He replied, “In 2009. Last December (in 2008) I met with 30 CIOs and they were all planning for it to happen this year. CIOs view this as a low-cost way to increase productivity. Obviously there are travel cost savings, but increasingly [IPV] is being used for reassuring concerned employees [with improved communications].” Graziani also noted that the increased bandwidth capacity and improvements in video encoding / decoding technology have also contributed to making 2009 the year for a tipping point.

We also asked him how businesses justify their ROI, and he gave an example of a large VBrick customer’s experience, saying the customer “grew through acquisition but was challenged to create a corporate culture, telling us ‘we need more communication.’ They started with video conferencing that went from one conferencing room to another but they needed to offer Webcasts of over 100,000 employees across remote locations all over the world. [So the solution] was to do video conference rooms and Webcasts to the desktop at the same time that could [then] be managed for the whole corporation or to specific user groups. And it was recorded so employees could go back for the video [based] records.”

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This week, we turn our focus back to video over IP (or what we call IPV) starting today with some insights provided by Vince Graziani, CEO of VBrick Systems. VBrick started to offer IPV in 1997, and has over 60,000 video appliances and products installed with over 5,000 customers. In a recent interview, Graziani shared his views about the increasing need to engineer corporate networks for video first and data second. He also shared a user case story to illustrate the business case for IPV.

We started our interview with Graziani by asking “when is the tipping point to engineer for video first and data second in the corporate network?” He replied, “In 2009. Last December (in 2008) I met with 30 CIOs and they were all planning for it to happen this year. CIOs view this as a low-cost way to increase productivity. Obviously there are travel cost savings, but increasingly [IPV] is being used for reassuring concerned employees [with improved communications].” Graziani also noted that the increased bandwidth capacity and improvements in video encoding / decoding technology have also contributed to making 2009 the year for a tipping point.

We also asked him how businesses justify their ROI, and he gave an example of a large VBrick customer’s experience, saying the customer “grew through acquisition but was challenged to create a corporate culture, telling us ‘we need more communication.’ They started with video conferencing that went from one conferencing room to another but they needed to offer Webcasts of over 100,000 employees across remote locations all over the world. [So the solution] was to do video conference rooms and Webcasts to the desktop at the same time that could [then] be managed for the whole corporation or to specific user groups. And it was recorded so employees could go back for the video [based] records.”

When we followed up about the challenges of the IPV deployment, he said, “not all the remote locations had multicast, and some had small [broadband] pipes. So we had to complete network assessments for every site. So we provided a unicast to the site then a multicast within the site. We built an application to meet every site’s specific need.”

Our observations: it sounds like (based on VBrick’s experience) that in some ways IPV deployment has business and deployment themes that are common with VoIP and unified communications. First, IPV can improve productivity and employee communications. Second, network assessments on a corporate-wide and site-specific basis are a prerequisite. And third, the capacity to develop targeted applications improves the overall experience.

Our thanks to Mr. Graziani for his insights. Next time, we’ll hear from Psytechnics about something they call “IP MOS.”

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Larry Hettick is a principal analyst at Current Analysis.