Avistar Issues 2012 Personal Videoconferencing Trend Predictions

Avistar Communications Corp. (www.avistar.com), a leader in unified visual communications solutions, announced its annual list of trends that it believes will most significantly impact the videoconferencing sector in the coming year.

Businesses will continue to see the high value of videoconferencing, and more importantly, personal videoconferencing, as an essential method of improving collaboration and productivity. There will be continued growth in virtual environments such as virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and cloud-based services, as companies embrace new delivery methods. As with 2011, bandwidth management, interoperability, reliability and quality will be key issues for enterprise customers. These trends are all driven by the need to increase productivity, decrease operating costs and leverage business assets in a real-time and collaborative business environment.

Here are important trends to watch:

• Videoconferencing will continue to be virtually everywhere - Businesses have embraced cloud computing and the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to improve workforce collaboration, control costs and deliver software tools that are essential to improved employee productivity, regardless of location or device. The next phase is on-demand videoconferencing cloud- and VDI-enabled services that are available to any business, delivered through industry- leading infrastructure, network and application service providers.
• The speed of change is increasing - Over the past three years, the industry has moved from hardware-based conference room solutions to software-only videoconferencing on laptops to conducting calls on tablets. This rate of change will continue and price/performance ratios will improve, driven by the cloud and increased connectivity on all sorts of devices. To take advantage of the rapid change (and to be able to rapidly change), companies should seek out videoconferencing solutions that take an all-software approach – as opposed to more expensive and less flexible hardware-based solutions.
• Consumerization of technology continues to drive business adoption - Computers were not conceived as a consumer device. Now consumers drive technology adoption, downloading and testing free apps and services and demanding more intuitive user interfaces. Enterprise apps such as business-class videoconferencing will continue to become more user-friendly while delivering reliable, secure and scalable videoconferencing capabilities built to meet business needs.
• BYOD will go mainstream - Information technology departments traditionally limited the types of devices they offered employees (and allowed employees to use on their networks) based upon the belief that it was inefficient and complicated to support too many platforms or systems. With the need to be flexible and drive down costs, IT departments are rethinking these outdated policies. Today, employees expect to BYOD – Bring Your Own Devices – and have them sync with their corporate technology. That means IT departments must support Windows, iOS, Mac, Android and Linux devices and machines. That means that companies must select cross-platform solutions that can be securely delivered. Once again, the virtual desktop comes to the rescue.
• Videoconferencing solutions need to get along and play nicely - As more businesses rely on videoconferencing, interoperability, availability and scalability become critical. Solutions that are not based upon industry standards such as SIP and H.264, for example, will increase the cost of videoconferencing. Emerging unified communications platforms not based on industry standards or not fully interoperable will create significant barriers to adoption. Videoconferencing solutions that can cost-effectively break down these interoperability barriers will emerge as important unifying strategies and find quicker paths to adoption on a broad basis.
• Bandwidth on the run - As more users rely on videoconferencing wherever they are, there will be more stress on data plans as well as corporate networks. Bandwidth usage, even via the cloud, becomes a cost issue as IT departments also must ensure that increased usage from outside the network does not impact security or critical business applications. Companies need to select communications solutions that provide robust bandwidth management, call admission control, user policy support, threshold and utilization modeling, in addition to extensive reporting and forecasting capabilities.

“Businesses in 2012 want anytime, anywhere videoconferencing that works with any device, that can be delivered securely and that will not negatively impact their networks. CFOs want solutions that are economical with a proven ROI, while CEOs and COOs want enhanced productivity and creativity," said Stephen Epstein, CMO, Avistar. "With the convergence and availability of all these technologies, 2012 certainly will emerge as an important year for the videoconferencing industry and businesses alike. We look forward to another exciting year of being a true partner to businesses in their quest to address these needs.”

About Avistar Communications Corporation

Avistar (OTC: AVSR) delivers the industry’s most advanced and proven desktop videoconferencing capabilities to technology partners and end users worldwide. Many leading technology firms such as Citrix, IBM, LifeSize, and Logitech choose Avistar’s modular software technology to power their unified communications solutions because it is a more flexible, efficient and smarter alternative. Avistar’s innovative software-only, fully virtualized and bandwidth managed technology solves major infrastructure and user challenges associated with enabling video communications between individual employees and/or teams throughout an organization. Companies across a wide variety of industries depend on Avistar’s desktop videoconferencing solutions for everyday business communications with deployments ranging in size from 30 to 35,000 users. To learn more about Avistar’s industrial, scalable and economical desktop videoconferencing technology, please visit www.avistar.com.