Leading Analyst Firms Forecast Increased Spending on Video Conferencing

SAN DIEGO, Aug. 25, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Global analyst firms have identified an uptick in video conferencing spending, as SMBs and enterprises embrace the benefits of real-time visual communications technologies. Infonetics predicts enterprises will spend $5 billion on videoconferencing and telepresence systems by 2015, and Frost & Sullivan forecasts the Web conferencing and collaboration market will reach $4.12 billion by 2014.  

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Video conferencing software developer Nefsis has seen its product mix shift from 50% on-premise in 2008 to 90% cloud-based software-as-a-service delivery (SaaS) today, and as a result, predicts an increasing role played by cloud-based solutions in the next few years. To assist companies in the decision-making process, Nefsis has identified the critical components businesses should evaluate when deploying video conferencing to get the maximum cloud-enabled benefits.

"Cloud computing and video conferencing are more popular than ever, but there are fundamental differences that set the leading cloud-based solutions apart," said Tom Toperczer, Nefsis Vice President of Marketing. "Be sure to look for multiple points of presence and real-time, distributed workload balancing – a centralized data center or a single hosted video router is not exactly in the spirit or technical meaning of the word 'cloud.'"

A globally distributed network of servers that reacts in real-time to conference events and network conditions power the automated load-balancing, fail-over, and high-scalability benefits of cloud computing, elaborated Company officials.

"SMBs today are looking for enterprise-class communication capabilities like high-quality video conferencing, at a price they can afford. Taking the cloud approach is a great way to provide these capabilities, but not all cloud video conferencing solutions are the same," stated Robert Poe, Principal Analyst at VoIP Evolution and author of the recently released report SMB Video Conferencing: Getting Beyond Clouds & Interoperability.

"To be truly useful, cloud-based video conferencing solutions have to perform well even over unreliable network connections, and offer sophisticated collaboration tools in addition to video conferencing," added Poe.

Nefsis lists the following as critical components for meeting forecasted demands as video conferencing grows beyond the boardroom:

• Virtualization in a true cloud: A video conferencing cloud should provide physically distributed resources where conference sessions are virtualized and load-balanced in real-time. Load balancing, automated fail over, and high scalability are foundational capabilities.
• Low latency: A good system should virtualize conference sessions closer to participants.
• Multipoint HD: Good 'cloud' implementations should leverage parallel processing software and should easily encode/decode multipoint HD video to the physical limits of the video peripheral and bandwidth availability.
• Dynamic scalable video: Some form of variable bitrate encoding or scalable video is also important for ensuring smooth operation over existing networks and variable network conditions prevalent in desktop and on-the-fly video conferencing. Customers may elect to dedicate bandwidth for HD 1080p, but should not be required to do so.
• Advanced collaboration: The cloud is a platform for software delivery. A good cloud-based implementation should provide seamlessly integrated collaboration tools. As an example, over 95% of Nefsis customers use at least one collaboration feature beyond simple screen sharing.
• Includes advanced IT features: Built-in network diagnostics, Quality of Service (QoS) compatibility, firewall and proxy traversal, and industry standard SSL/TLS security for all web, VoIP and video data are crucial components to ensure video conferencing runs well over existing customer networks and the networks of those they wish to conference with.

The cloud-based advantages listed above are standard features of Nefsis Professional. For a free 14-day trial of Nefsis Professional, visit www.Nefsis.com.

About Nefsis

Headquartered in San Diego, California, Nefsis is a technology specialist in video conferencing software and cloud computing online services. The Company's global cloud provides multipoint HD video and advanced collaboration tools to business, government and educational customers in more than 45 countries worldwide. As compared to previous generations of infrastructure hardware solutions such as video routers, MCUs and gateways, the Nefsis cloud-based offering is less expensive, automatically maintained, and easier to expand.

For more information, please visit http://www.nefsis.com or call +1 (858) 715-0970 in the Americas or +44 (0) 870 224 0415 in the UK and Europe.

Nefsis is a registered trademark of Nefsis Corporation. All other trademarks mentioned are property of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACT
Xenia Moore
Phone: (858) 715-0970
[email protected]  

SOURCE Nefsis Corporation