Research And Markets: Today Vendors Are Addressing The Video Device Management, Video Network Management, Call Processing, And Scheduling Needs Of Users With Increasingly Sophisticated Software Solutions

Research and Markets (researchandmarkets.com/reports/c11235) has announced the addition of Video Communications Management Systems 2004 to their offering.

(PRWEB) December 17, 2004 -- This updated report explores a new area of software designed to improve the lives of videoconferencing network administrators and users alike. Three major categories of software - management and monitoring, call processing, and scheduling - are described in detail.

This report includes:
- Market Overview
- Technology Overview
- Vendor Profiles
- Industry Forecast

Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c11235) has announced the addition of Video Communications Management Systems 2004 to their offering.

Vendors profiled in depth include:
- Aethra
- AMX Corporation
- Forgent Networks
- Magicsoft
- Polycom
- RADVISION
- Renovo Software LLC
- TANDBERG
- VCON
- VisionNex.

Video communications management software is one of the most dynamic segments of the visual communications and rich media conferencing industries. Vendors are addressing the video device management, video network management, call processing, and scheduling needs of users with increasingly sophisticated software solutions. Some of these new products are coming from third party vendors who are concentrating on this area exclusively; others have been put forth by the hardware vendors. In either case, vendors are addressing fundamental needs of service providers and enterprise users alike: i) as more equipment is being deployed, customers need efficient ways to manage, monitor, and control these devices from a central location (or several locations for large, geographically dispersed networks); ii) as videoconferencing becomes more widespread, the need for higher reliability increases and becomes more visible; iii) enterprise resources, including bandwidth, need to be used effectively, reliably, and in a more cost-efficient manner; and iv) users need rich media communications functions that emulate the familiar voice PBX functions and help make these new communications solutions work the way users want to work - ad hoc, reliably, and feature rich with call processing capabilities.

Market Overview
This Research believes that, emulating the personal computing industry, the videoconferencing industry is undergoing a natural evolution. It is moving away from its past based on unmanaged, isolated devices and toward a new world consisting of connected, monitored, scheduled, and highly managed complete" networks of devices (whereby devices are readily understood, and part of a comprehensive, dynamic entity). Enabling this evolution is a new class of management tools, software that can manage various combinations of group systems, desktop systems, multipoint control units (MCUs), gateways, gatekeepers, external A/V devices, bandwidth, and even dialing scenarios. A few of the vendors offering these tools are videoconferencing system and bridge manufacturers; others are software and/or services firms (or combinations of these types of vendors). This report addresses similarities and differences in approach, functional capabilities, strengths and weaknesses, pricing and packaging, and explains the relative positioning of these new tools and the vendors behind them. We segment the software products covered in this report into three major functional areas: monitoring and management, call processing, and scheduling. Some category bleeding is occurring (and undoubtedly will continue to occur) between these three categories; some products that call themselves management products provide some scheduling or call processing capabilities; some do not. One vendors bandwidth management can be very different from another vendors. One vendors system statistics may refer to jitter and latency, another to call detail records and logs of completed calls. This report, through detailed market overview, technology overview, vendor profiles, and product matrices, carefully notes specific functionality accorded to the 10 vendors and their 17 software products covered. It tries to clearly portray each vendors strengths and weaknesses, even with the category blurring and overlapping functionality that exist at this time.

$24.4M in 2003. This was the result of a slowdown in software spending, some industry consolidation, and perhaps a pause on the part of buyers to focus on IP and ISDN convergence. With the investments that large networks make into equipment and infrastructure for video, there is a clear opportunity to show return on investment for the software vendors - as many already are doing for their customers.

The contents of this report are as follows:
Chapter 1. Executive Summary
Chapter 2. Market Overview
Chapter 3. Technology Overview
Chapter 4. Vendor Profiles
Chapter 5. Industry Forecast

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c11235

Laura Wood
Senior Manager
Research and Markets
press@researchandmarkets.com
Fax: +353 1 4100 980

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