Understanding Desktop Video Solutions, How They Scale, Bandwidth Considerations and Their Total Cost of Ownership
This report begins with a fundamental question: if an enterprise already has a telephony system, what would it take to add multi-party desktop video to it and what would such a solution look like with respect to scalability, network impact, and total cost of ownership? To answer this question, solutions from five major desktop video providers have been assessed:
Desktop Video Providers and Their Solutions
| Provider | Desktop/Tablet Client |
|---|---|
| Avaya | Avaya Flare Experience |
| Cisco | Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx |
| Polycom | Polycom RealPresence Desktop/Mobile |
| Microsoft | Microsoft Lync 2010/2013 |
| Vidyo | Vidyo Vidyo Desktop/Vidyo Mobile |
We begin with a discussion of the research methodology used. We then review Scalable Video Coding (SVC) and point out how it differs from H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) and H.263 video encoding with respect to capabilities and the impact on network bandwidth. For each vendor’s offering, we then:
- Provide an overview of the solution
- Discuss how it integrates with existing call control
- Show an architectural overview,
- Describe the underlying encoding technology and how it scales
- Compute the impact on network bandwidth for several use cases, and
- Show the total cost of ownership for those use cases including hardware, software licensing, maintenance, and network over a multi-year period.
We conclude with an analysis of these results and offer our conclusions.
This document examines the impact pervasive desktop video will have on the enterprise network and the subsequent total cost of ownership (TCO) an enterprise will experience when deploying desktop video across multiple sites. There are several major providers of desktop video solutions, and their solutions are not equivalent. Some offer desktop video as an element of their unified communications suites, while others focus on being video conferencing providers first but with some UC integration points. Consequently, it is critical to understand key implementation and deployment differences among them that affect the total cost of deployment and ownership.
