Web, Audio, and Video Conferencing

Conferencing is not new to most organizations; however, a unified conferencing experience is new. Many organizations have web, audio, and video conferencing through three separate third-party providers. For web and audio conferencing, organizations are typically charged a monthly fee per user in addition to a per-minute fee for using these services. For video conferencing, some organizations have large deployments of video conferencing equipment on their network, whereas others might be using a third-party hosted solution.

The services available in each of these areas can vary greatly. Some audio conferencing solutions are simply PSTN dial-in bridges, in which all users in a conference will dial a PSTN phone number and be placed into a conference hosted by the provider. Some web conferencing solutions will provide a web browser application for conferencing functionality, whereas others require a desktop application to be installed. Which service options are available to organizations is not entirely important for this section; however, it is important that these services are usually not interoperable with each other. This leads to a disjoined conferencing experience, and organizations are not able to realize the true benefits of conferencing.