Cloud Based Collaboration – Coming to Your B2B Partner Soon!

By Bob Preston

I vividly remember my first week at Polycom about four years ago. I was orienting with the company in the West coast, Silicon Valley, corporate HQ and had spoken to a great job candidate on the East coast who would be one my first hires at the company. I thought it best to seal the deal with a “face-to-face” interview by video conferencing. But the candidate did not live in close proximity to a company office where he could drop in to connect with me by video. So, thinking outside the box, in a newbie kind of way, I reserved a public video conferencing room for him at a FedEx-Kinkos location.

Thinking I was very smart, I began to discuss with the Kinkos booking reservation agent how I would connect with him from my Polycom office. I soon awakened to the reality of most video conferencing networks - they are typically closed islands able to interconnect only to locations within their own enterprise network. The agent politely informed me that to connect to the FedEx-Kinkos location I had reserved for the candidate, I would also have to be in a room on the same FedEx-Kinkos network. Frustrated, I made a second room reservation and drove 30 miles to the only video equipped room in my metropolitan area. The good news? The trip was well worth it. I had a great interview and the candidate turned out to be one of the best hires of my career.


Connecting with Business
Partners and Customers (B2B)
by Video Conference Provides
Increased Efficiencies and
Business Productivity

While video conferencing within workflows and business processes of an enterprise is still the sweet spot in today’s market, I speak with customers all the time who long for the day to easily connect to business partners, customers, and individuals outside their corporate network. After all, they pick up the phone and call partners and customers every day by voice dial, so why not video? This type of seamless video interconnect, commonly referred to as “B2B” or “Cloud Services”, is now in play and being discussed among managed and network service providers around the world. I recently returned from the Visual Communications Industry Group (VCI-G) Conference in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and B2B video conferencing was the buzz word of the conference.

Figure 1 - B2B Cloud Based Collaboration

So why the buzz and what’s the issue? Business-to-business is first and foremost about trust between the connecting parties. The identity of the communicating parties has to be verified and mechanisms put in place to prevent eavesdropping. To make this a seamless process, an enterprise-class communications service provider is typically involved to make the connection and act as a trusted third party who guarantees identity verification, connectivity and communication security.



Real-time B2B video communication can also be challenging because video applications support multiple protocols which firewalls on either end of the connection may not allow. Cloud services therefore must include firewall traversal mechanisms, such as Interactive Connectivity Establishment (ICE) for SIP communication and H.460 for H.323 communication. Clouds must also provide call control functionality which includes dialing plans and call routing.

It’s not my intent in this post to get into a technical explanation of video conferencing through the cloud. For that, I defer to my colleague Stefan Karapetkov who recently made an excellent post to his blog, Video Networker, on this topic titled Voice and Video Services in the Cloud. 



Access to Subject Matter
Experts Speeds the Feedback
Loop and Decision Making
Process

Instead, I would like to focus on the business applications and collaboration solutions that will soon be made possible by true B2B video conferencing. Consider the diagram in Figure 1 above and imagine the possibilities. Quick access to and availability to subject matter experts significantly improves overall business performance in any organization. Let’s assume “Company A” is a manufacturer with R&D and engineering in the USA but supply partner “Company B” is in Europe and outsourced manufacturing line “Company C” is in China. B2B cloud-based video conferencing will enable the availability of subject matter experts from these diverse organizations to share relevant information, face-to-face from their respective time zones, without the need to ever board a plane. This improves efficiency and reduces the total time-to-market cycle by allowing for real-time collaboration in reviewing designs, component choices, and manufacturing quality. The net positive benefit is not only on business efficiency and productivity, but also on the confidence level of employees and ultimately customer satisfaction.

Other key benefits:

• Address contingency scenarios with greater ease
• Reduce latency in time of response and feedback process
• Efficiency of overall communications streamlines business operations
• Timely and accurate decision making
• Improved quality of work

Another sector benefiting from B2B cloud-based collaboration will be SMB. Lacking the IT and financial resources of their enterprise brethren, small businesses can benefit greatly from managed or “hosted” service solutions that are inexpensive, as well as easy to deploy and manage. Advanced video and telepresence collaboration, once reserved for larger enterprises, will soon be open to the world of small to medium businesses and allow them to be more competitive from collaboration solutions.

Further, remember the FedEx-Kinkos story? B2B and cloud-based video services will allow for public video conference room networks to expand beyond their island and allow for interconnect capabilities through service provider relationships. The company with the largest number of executive office centers, Regus, has installed 14 locations with telepresence suites to allow enterprises and SMBs to extend video conferencing beyond their walls to other locations in key cities. If this had only been the case four years ago … I could have saved myself that 30 mile drive for the video interview!

Related Links and Articles:

• Session Border Controllers Evolving to Support Video Conferencing - No Jitter Blog
• Polycom, Aruba Partner On Cloud Video Conferencing - InformationWeek
• Video Conferencing Technology and Cloud Computing on Tap at Wainhouse Summit - Unified Communications News

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