Article from last years Fortune magazine FYI...
ERICK SCHONFELD
DESKTOP BOARDROOM
BUY
Long an ungainly form of communication that required over $30,000 worth
of bulky, room-size equipment, videoconferencing is finally evolving
into a more practical, desktop creature. It is also becoming more
versatile: Multiple participants from many locations can share data such
as spreadsheets and documents while conversing through video links. At
the center of this transformation is VideoServer (VSVR, Nasdaq), the
leading supplier of the new, lithe multimedia conference servers that
coordinate all the traffic. CEO Robert Castle compares the technology
with word processing: "It used to be delivered on proprietary hardware
but now is becoming an application that runs on the PC."
Companies like PictureTel and British Telecom, which specialize in
selling entire videoconferencing systems, originally made their own
central switching units. But as customers discovered the utility of
conducting meetings from more than two locations at once, they found
that equipment from different makers didn't connect. Thus VideoServer
was formed in 1991 to develop technology that could link all the
disparate systems. The company soon persuaded about three-quarters of
the conference outfits to abandon their proprietary boxes and instead
include VideoServer's gear as part of their packages. More recently,
telecommunications heavy hitters Siemens and Northern Telecom agreed to
resell the product. AT&T and MCI, which offer videoconferencing as a
service, are customers as well. In the first half of this year, profits
of the Burlington, Massachusetts, company spiked up 163% to $4 million,
on sales of $21 million.
Although the stock is trading at about 50 times this year's earnings
estimates (in line with where most networking companies trade), analysts
are bullish. By this Christmas some PCs will include new Intel software
that for the first time will allow computer-to-computer
videoconferencing over regular telephone lines. And soon, Microsoft will
add a data-conferencing standard to new versions of Windows 95, which
will make real-time collaborative computing more feasible. Much as if
they were using Lotus Notes, business teams will be able to share and
change the same document, but all at the same time instead of passing it
from one person to the next. Sitting in the middle making sure everyone
is working off the same page and watching the same video feeds will most
likely be VideoServer hardware. |
