Online Collaboration – The New Way to Work
While most enterprises make regular use of audio or video teleconferencing services, only a relative few have experimented with managed streaming applications over the Internet. But with the prospect of new enterprises coming on board, the managed streaming space is becoming crowded with competitors offering a wide range of services.
Akamai's Kirkish notes, "The application space is breaking into sectors at this point. Collaborative applications would support small group interactions with various interactive features involved… things like application demos and whiteboarding. Webcasting is one-to-many, and those audience sizes can be in the thousands."
"Sales conferences are kind of sacred. There is something about them you can't replicate over the Internet. Nothing will ever replace the sales conference because you can't stream alcohol.
Service providers in the webcasting space are able to offer large audiences chat, polling and survey capabilities. On the simpler end of the scale, new do-it-yourself applications allow managers to create their own streaming presentations with PowerPoint slides and a telephone. And applications such as video search and digital asset management allow large corporations to index and track thousands of hours of media. "Any company who puts in comprehensive distance learning and online training will be looking for improved search capabilities going forward," Kirkish says.
The Corporate Bandwidth
Even though there are scores of vendors eager to bring streaming media to the enterprise, there are still significant obstacles to the widespread acceptance of streaming within corporations. Large companies may have more available bandwidth than consumers, but streaming must compete with other data for space on the corporate network. (Enterprises typically stream at 100Kbps to 300Kbps on their intranets, and 28.8Kbps to 100Kbps on the Internet.)
RealNetworks' Marty Roberts says, "We work closely with our customers to ensure that we cannot impact any type of other mission critical application on the network. Whether it's database access or an e-commerce application going over their Web site or even just e-mail, streaming media has to be respectful of those other applications on the network."
Peter Raymond, product manager for desktop Internet access at the Bank of Montreal, uses the RealSystem Proxy 8 to allow bank employees to view content streaming from outside Web sites - such as analyst briefings - while still protecting his network from a bandwidth crisis. Raymond notes, "The proxy allows us to control the bandwidth utilization both at the gateway as well as at the client end. We can also control the number of concurrent users."
For live webcasts, the build-out of multicast-enabled networks in the enterprise should take some of the pressure off corporate pipes. But that build-out will take time. Even Cisco has some locations in Asia that are not yet multicast-enabled. HP is in a similar situation. Michael Lachtanski, manager of media solutions at HP, explains, "A lot of the small field offices, and the pipes that go across to Asia and Europe, are not multicast capable. We're beginning to implement a kind of multicast bubble where we'll send a single stream to a local server that will then multicast within that geography. But that's not deployed yet."
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