Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, October 16, 2006

Since AT&T’s demonstration of the world’s first video phone at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, proponents of video conferencing have foretold of a day when video calls replaced telephone calls. But 42 years later that day still hasn’t arrived. Will it ever?

Ann Earon here on Collaboration Loop recently posted some very interesting articles on video conferencing. Given that I’ve spent the last several weeks interviewing enterprise IT executives about their usage of, and plans for, collaboration, convergence and mobility technologies, I wanted to share my own thoughts about what I’m hearing specifically with regard to video conferencing.

Communications and collaboration systems vendors and service providers often tout video as the next big thing now that VoIP has moved into the mainstream. Cisco provides built-in video capabilities in its latest version of its CallManager communications platform. Microsoft recently unveiled a new video conferencing camera called “Office RoundTable”. (See video demonstration of Office RoundTable here.) And as Ann noted recently, telepresence solutions from Cisco and HP, as well as high-definition video conferencing systems from LifeSize, Polycom and others are gathering a great deal of attention. (It’s worth noting that IBM Lotus did not include video capabilities as a built-in feature of the recent SameTime 7.5 release, preferring instead to support integration of third-party systems.)

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