Business video solutions on the rise in Australia and New Zealand

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: In a recent survey, Ovum identified a number of opportunities for providers of unified communication (UC) and business video services for large enterprises in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ).

The quantity of video solutions has considerably increased over the last few years and this momentum is expected to continue. Although there is growing demand for greater interoperability across multiple devices and different access technologies, there is enormous customer acceptance of high-definition (HD) video conferencing.

With the life-sized images found in telepresence offerings (or near life-sized images found in other video conferencing offerings), superior audio and visual quality, and a strengthening business case built around travel cost and time savings, room-based video conferencing is the most popular video solution among large enterprises. These solutions are also playing a key role in increasing awareness about the benefits of video collaboration, which is now expected to spread across the enterprise through more economical low-end solutions (e.g. PC-based).

Claudio Castelli, Ovum senior analyst, commented: "Not surprisingly, desktop video is expected to show the greatest growth, with 21% of survey respondents expecting to deploy it in the coming year. This percentage is greater than in other developed regions and can be explained by the fact that sites of enterprises in ANZ are more likely to be located in remote areas that are not served by MPLS or Ethernet nodes that would support high-end video services."

Castelli added: “Local and national SIs are the most trusted providers of managed HD video conferencing services for large enterprises in ANZ (29 percent), but this preference is not as high as in Europe or the US. Telcos come next with 26 percent of the preference.

"This is good news for telcos in the region, whose ability to provide this service is well perceived by customers compared to other developed regions. We expect this preference to grow as we see telcos increasing their SI capabilities in video by either investing in existing divisions or by acquisitions. Telstra, for example, has recently acquired the video integrator iVision in an attempt to lead the video conferencing market in Australia."

"Telcos should explore the lack of relatively strong local and national SIs specialized in this market to develop a sound customer base. Combining HD video conferencing with network services in an integrated managed proposition with end-to-end SLAs will provide an additional strong differentiator against other types of providers," concluded Castelli.