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Tuesday, August 31, 2010

The Importance of HD Video Conferencing for the SMB

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

How important is video conferencing in today’s market? A quick look around and the commercial sector is quickly moving that direction, but the SMB may be struggling to find HD video conferencing options – unless they look to Vidtel.

In a recent interview with Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel Inc., TMC’s Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) explored the market with Wharton and learned what the company does now and what they are planning to do next. Their conversation was captured in this video.

Vidtel (News - Alert) has been around almost two and a half years and is a video conferencing cloud provider. They have an SMB focus for HD from a hosting perspective. Their service is device agnostic, so it can work with any SIP device. They all connect to Vidtel without having to run SBCs and users can call each other or other people to drive HD video conferencing without significant investment.

As for the competition? “From a consumer point of view, it is hard to compete against Skype (News - Alert) when it’s free,” said Wharton. “You need to not only be a little bit better, we need to be 10 x better. So, we’re offering HD quality, big screen video conferencing. “And for businesses, they really want to have a certain level of quality in order to replicate a meeting.

At the same time, while large enterprises may have a lot of IT people to help figure this out, the SMB market – they don’t have that.”Wharton went on to note that they need to have an outsourced service that delivers high quality that enables collaboration. Vidtel aims to fulfill that need.Currently, Vidtel acts as a partner and reseller of LifeSize (News - Alert) and other key players within this space.

Such companies have channel issues and cannot target the SMB. So, Vidtel helps them bridge that gap.As for channels of selling, Vidtel markets through the video conferencing vendors themselves and some VoIP providers. The company is also looking for VARs, as it is a channel-focused company. Vidtel is now in what they consider to be late beta. The company is working to get all platforms to get them interoperable and getting ready for a full launch. Any interop with iPhone (News - Alert) on the horizon? As Whorton notes, the plan is to be able to interop with any device.

2 comments:

  1. Very useful blog because i dont know the importance of video conferencing and after reading your blog, now i have the knowledge about video conferencing. Thanks for sharing information with us.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It is not only useful for Organizations, but also showing its impact in education field, it is connecting educational institutions in cities and isolated geography areas to share knowledge in better way.

    ReplyDelete