News that Cisco will be buying Tandberg was announced last week. Because of Eyenetwork’s niche in public room hire, we are often unaffected by video conferencing industry news, but this announcement feels extremely welcome.

Cisco have already excited the industry with their excellent (but proprietary) Telepresence products. Now with Tandberg an important part of the Cisco family, we can look towards a massive increase in high definition video conferencing end points. Also it seems that Cisco will now take seriously the issues of interoperability amongst networks and codecs: Tandberg has consistently shown commitment to interoperability throughout its Telepresence offering and has a large range of video conferencing products covering all budgets.

To achieve optimum use by businesses it is necessary for all Telepresence units to be interoperable regardless of manufacturer, and the ability to link with traditional video conference units is essential. Then maybe some of our bureaus will upgrade to Telepresence suites, at the moment there is no incentive for them to spend such a large amount of money when they can only connect with a limited amount of end points. The public room hire market is about the ability to connect everywhere regardless of equipment; and this explains why to the surprise of many in the industry, meetings over ISDN still comprise of 70% of all our bookings: guaranteed quality with no packet loss or firewall issues.

Before long, we will get to the point that Henry Ford reached when he started producing millions of cars. The production and demand forced a massive upgrade of the world highway infrastructure. So what we now need is for telecommunications companies to add significant volumes of HD quality, low latency broadband, at affordable prices. And then the revolution in video communications, the one we have been waiting for such a long time, will really take off!