Cisco embraces 'videoconferencing as a service'

Cisco may have just clinched a big name customer and an acquisition in videoconferencing but analysts believe conferencing vendors are missing a trick when it comes to cooperation.

Last week Cisco announced it intended to buy videoconferencing company WebEx for $3.2bn. The networking company also announced Regus, which rents out managed office space, became the latest customer for its TelePresence videoconferencing offering. As part of the deal users at 50 Regus facilities will take part in high-definition videoconference calls to colleagues and clients.

According to David Molony, principal analyst at Ovum, the acquisition indicates Cisco's move towards a more service-oriented approach.

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"Cisco has made a significant move with the Regus deal, by putting VC right in line with its professional services' strategy. Cisco is slowly redefining its technologies as services and moving into network service management (witness the Webex acquisition)," he said in a research note.

However, Moloney noted that videoconferencing is still a show-and-tell experience - and allowing participants to see a slide of a presentation or document is a far cry from true collaborative working.

"Giving presentations on VC really brings home the need to be able to share them electronically. Static display of slides is great in HD quality but they can be lost in multipoint screen shows. Vendors are still wrestling with speaker identification and indeed conferencing protocol. Control takes an astute chairman as much as anything," he said.

Molony added that the question of standards is likely to cause problems as businesses will likely want to continue using diverse standards, including HD, standard definition and extended definition after they upgrade from their legacy networks.