Video conferencing is one of the hottest collaboration technology today and for a very good reason. It connects businesses, allowing entrepreneurs to contact their clients and communicate as effectively as if they were talking to them in person. In a sense, it is considered the next best thing to physically “being there.”
In order to enhance a company’s investment and make the most out of the use of this technology, it is important to take into consideration various elements that come into play when setting up video conferencing facilities. Two of these factors are interoperability and open standards.
Open Standards Video Conferencing
Open standards are readily available and accessible to everyone. These refer to royalty-free technologies that have been approved by industry standards. The term is often used in conjunction with ‘open source’ as a standard is said to be open only when it has a complete or open source reference implementation.
Open standards in video conferencing allow businesses to reduce the costs incurred in adopting the collaboration technology and setting up the pertinent tools for it. The standard is available for everyone to implement with the software and the platform easily retrieved through the Internet or any other source. This is especially important for small and medium-scale enterprises looking to venture into the global market. Because they don’t have sufficient capital to spend on specialized conferencing facilities, going for open standards allows them a cost-effective method of expanding their businesses and their reach.
Interoperability and Video Conferencing
Interoperability is a concept which refers to an ability of diverse systems or organizations to work towards one goal together. In telecommunications, this covers all systems, forces and units that are able to provide and accept services to and from other forces, systems and units. These services are exchanged towards one goal of transmitting messages through a selected medium.
Interoperability is important to maximizing one’s investment because video conferencing systems should have the ability of working with other systems outside the company’s own network. In order to maximize the cost effectiveness of this technology, video conferencing systems have to allow companies to communicate with their contacts from other networks effectively.
Interoperability and Open Standards Working Together
The challenge now is to search for a system that allows for maximized interoperability. These days, the popular contention is that disparate video solutions do not really work as efficiently as when they are working with systems within their kind. This is where codec utilization comes into play. Open source codecs that bring together various video conferencing systems are essential to the success of this technology. They serve as the missing puzzle pieces to the issue of getting different telecommunications systems to work together efficiently.
Companies have to select the most flexible and scalable video conferencing solutions so they can make the most out of the technology. They should be open to the idea that in order for them to be able to communicate with other business partners, they have to make their telecom systems open to support the network that their contacts may be using.
At SG Videoconferencing, we only work with brands that support industry wide interoperability and ITU (International Telecommunication Union) accredited standards. We care about our client’s investment in these collaboration systems and want to help them to get the most out of their investment and also future-proof them.