General observations
Delegates from the education and health sectors that attended the summit included UoW, USYD, CSU, LaTrobe, QLD TAFE, Swinburne, Griffith, SA TAFE and AARNet. Tandberg briefly summarised their new products including Experia (Telepresence), Movi (PC video conferencing), HD, SIP, OCS integration, mobility and streaming stressing that a integrated suite of solutions tailored to business needs was important to encourage greater adoption and use. Photos from day one are available online at http://picasaweb.google.com/aarnetrtc
Ross Dawson (Future exploration network) gave an insight into future technologies where he spoke about shifts in technology and organisational behavior that offer opportunities for more dynamic collaborative behavior via more unstructured communication relationships to add value. Controls on how much unstructured as opposed to hierarchical communications are allowed depended on the organisation's culture and skills base to determine whether a pure web 2.0 collaborative environment is beneficial or harmful in productivity terms.
David Solsky from environmental consulting company ZeroFootprint presented a thought provoking session on the real costs of non-compliance to carbon emission reduction initiatives. From July 1 companies will begin a government mandated approach to reporting their carbon emissions starting from major producers such as mining and industrials, and slowly increasing in scope to encompass other areas with above average outputs through production or inefficient business practice. The challenge presented is how to monitor and reduce individual carbon footprints as a contributor to the overall reduction strategies. Consumer behavior will change in corporate allegiances in the mid term with those not adopting a proactive strategy being cast aside. Corporate travel is seen as a major contributor to carbon footprints and businesses are being encouraged to look at alternatives where possible. The approaches were identified by David involve working at the coal face to understand the business practices that encourage more environmentally focussed thinking and embed carbon consideration as part of everyday commerce, adding carbon pricing into every business case. The talk speculated on a cost of approximately $20-$50 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted.
Targets for reduction that were highlighted included reduction of travel, energy usage, waste generation and consumables usage. David stressed the need for innovation to recreate, redesign and reveal strategies in the supply chain and distribution process right down to the end user and consumption stages.
Nick Ridehalgh from PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) talked about a business approach to climate change where he gave an insight in how they changed in order to be on track as carbon neutral by June 01, 2008 to encourage the best and brightest students to join them, to save money and to use the lessons learned to take advantage of consulting opportunities.
Nick explained that building and process changes were much easier than changing staff flying behaviour. Recent Stern and Garnaut reports suggest that current trends will see current rates reach 450 ppm carbon before dropping off if action is taken today at an estimated cost of 1% GDP. Failure to address this issue today would result in higher CO2 of up to 127% on 2000 levels by 2020 which may cost more than world war 1 & 2 and the great depression combined. Australia is expected to need a cut of 90% below 2000 emissions by 2025. Companies are having to address direct risks from climate change from extreme weather events and insurance implications and in second order risks related to an organisation's relationship with suppliers, competitors, customers, staff and internal and external stakeholders. PWC recommends that a proper response to this issue requires a strategy review and adjustment of business models to reposition business operations to diversify, invest and dispose in a green way. ICT departments see the green agenda as a driver to reduce costs and transform the value chain in the customer/supplier relationship by implementing (a) formal environment policies abd practices, (b) Assigning a Senior Exec on green issues, (c) Linking green initiatives to environmental sustainability and (d) Increases in external reporting on carbon use and environmental sustainability. A survey of Australian CEO found 67% are concerned with regulatory impacts, 60% saw impacts on their business reputation, only 2% had confidence and trust in their carbon reporting processes/data and only 5% had a budget establish to reduce the organisation's carbon footprint.
Will McDonald, former Codian founder and now current Tandberg Chief Strategy Officer covered for key focus areas
- Codian & Tandberg acquisition was explained as good fit from technical and corporate position, both also had financial strengthns.
- Remote collaboration seen as very important and access to a range of products and not in isolation
- R&D in the short term would be in integrating scheduling and desktop tools, infrastructure management and support for increased numbers of endpoints and MCU design to lower power consumption.
- Mobility of identity will be important with support for "find me" simple mobile addressing scheme to dial out to where a person is, whilst "meet me" was where users dial in to a particular conference.
Tandberg presented their technology road map stating current trends were that video was seen as critical and is being implemented with VoIP and Unified Communications, whilst requirements to scale are increasing to meet customer's growth in Video deployments. Tandberg foresee trends to 2012 to be in delivering better video (H.265, 1080p, HD, SVC), better audio (AAC-LD 20K), interworking capabilities (SIP, H.323, VoIP, others (OCS, IBM, Skype, Google), provisioning to the masses (plug and play to the network), scaling and reliability improvements and support for ad hoc on the fly conferences.
Nicolas Domeyko from Tandberg discussed Telepresence saying that there was confusion on the word as some vendors wanted to distance themselves from video and past pains experienced there. Telepresence was described as the most life like experience one can have with HQ video, directional audio to create an invisible technology experience. Telepresence was here in 1985 and has developed in an evolutionary fashion. Over the past 2 years across the ANZ region, of all vendor products (excluding demos) only 6 were bought in 2006 and a further 5 in 2007. Customer feedback indicates that operating versus capital expenditure costs are too high with high bandwidth costs at 12 Mbps costing as much as half the capital costs, (850K capital ver 400K operating costs based on 4 sites at 12 Mbps). Room operation costs are also high, to cater for air conditioning, sound, fire protection and certification, wiring/power. The level of comfort on multinational site set up is low. Tandberg believe that natural communications is key as opposed to any one product, their aim is to support a myraid of communication devices that one needs to align to business needs. Tandberg experia development work is addressing ease of use and integration with apps such as MS Exchange, IBM notes, scalable and mgt capable (TMS).
Kate Curran from Queensland Health spoke about their recent acquisition of videoconferencing technology and the associated battles to overcome the technology hurdle in bringing VC solutions within QH to production ready status. They had invested heavily in the Tandberg suite solution inclusive of two MPS800 bridges, gatekeeper infrastructure, management system (TMS) and Tandberg endpoints which were deployed in June 2007 on a mixed ISDN 128k and IP network.
Queensland Health's journey was not an easy one and Kate spoke about the finer points of indicating through vendors where problems had arisen and getting these acknowledged at a corporate level. Part of their journey was conversion from 99% of participants joining on low speed ISDN links to an MPLS IP network where one third of bandwidth was allocated to video purposes.
Issues of TMS performance and MPS transcoding dramas led to customer and staff impacts and a loss of confidence in the underlying technology. When raised to vendors these issues were flagged as new and unheard of before and attempts were made through various software upgrades to relieve the pressure however specific user case tweaks were what was needed to finally resolve the issues being experienced. Kate also admitted frustration when these previously 'unknown' problems were admittedly something that the more experienced engineers had seen before and believed had either been resolved or not of sufficient significance to highlight attention. Once the fixes were put into place by dedicated support engineers the benefits of the solution were becoming to become apparent. The benefits of XGA graphics transmission, increased capacity provided by the expanded bridging infrastructure and access for staff to ad hoc conferences led to increased acceptance.