The rise of business videoconferencing has been a long time coming, but can integration with UC and low-cost, fully featured systems finally take hold?

February 16, 2016

2 Min Read
Can Metaswitch Make Video Zoom?

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Business video-conferencing is about to explode because it's finally easy and cheap enough to be ubiquitous.

Yeah, I know. Me, too. I've probably written this story a half-dozen times before, dating back to like, 2005. And those stories have encompassed everything from telepresence (Corporations want a video experience that is like being there) to desktop video (Businesses don't want to waste money on big teleconference rooms) to mobile video (The key thing is to let everyone participate from wherever they are).

So when Metaswitch Networks tells me it's integrating Zoom Video Communications Inc. web and video into its Accession Unified Communications platform as part of a series of upgrades because this is a market set to explode, I was skeptical…to put it mildly. (See Metaswitch UC Integrates Zoom Video .)

The benefit of the integration is to let service providers using Accession give their business customers cloud-based web and video conferencing that their remote workers can easily access via multiple devices, Chris Carabello, senior director of product marketing for Metaswitch says. He sees UC as a 40% growth market for Metaswitch, and video is a big part of that, now that it can be easily incorporated.

"This will enable our customers to go after cloud-based UC and contact centers, and network-based Web conferencing and get a bigger wallet share of those markets," Carabello comments.

See the latest happenings as telecom business services migrate to the cloud in our cloud services section here on Light Reading.

He obviously isn't pulling those numbers out of a hat. Frost & Sullivan is predicting the North American hosted and cloud video conferencing services sector will grow at a 20.4% compound annual growth rate to hit $523.2 million in 2021.

Zoom's cloud video app is a bit different in that it isn't browser-based, but uses its own application. Carabello considers the company to be a market leader in "democratizing web and video collaboration and conferencing" by driving down prices and delivering on-demand functionality.

By tightly integrating the video conferencing experience, Metaswitch hopes that easy screen-sharing, multi-party video up to 50 streams at once and moderator controlled call-recording, among other features, make the Zoom video offer an appealing part of the overall UC package.

Whether that positions them to help Metaswitch's telecom customers compete with stand-alone offerings like Cisco's Webex and Citrix, or with less-featured video offers that are part of Lync/Skype, remains to be seen, as does that long-promised growth in business video conferencing.

— Carol Wilson, Editor-at-Large, Light Reading

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