Article in Daytona Beach News Journal on Video Communication

I was interviewed, along with the owner of Interchange Technologies, by the Daytona News Journal on how local businesses are using video to change the way we communicate.  Please read:

Video conferencing links ERAU locales

By JOE CREWS
Business Writer

DAYTONA BEACH -- When too few students sign up for a class at the Prescott, Ariz., campus of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, school officials just have them take the class with a professor here.

But the Arizona students don't have to leave their campus 75 miles north of Phoenix. Instead, they head for a classroom set up for video conferencing and actively take part in a class nearly a continent away.

"There may be 27 students taking a class here, but only three in Prescott," said Terry Dallas, an information technology manager at the campus here. "Instead of canceling the class in Arizona, those students take the class from Daytona Beach."

Embry-Riddle has five video-conferencing systems on the Daytona Beach campus and four in Arizona, all offering two-way transfers of live video and audio signals. University President John Johnson uses video conferencing to conduct meetings from his office, Dallas said.

"There's a great advantage to these systems, no doubt," she said. "We utilize them extensively campus-to-campus, especially for IT staff meetings and all-hands meetings once a month. It's a great opportunity to see your team, even if they're 3,000 or 4,000 miles away."

Embry-Riddle also has a system called Eagle Vision, a less-elaborate system used in the school's other far-flung classrooms.

"It's Web-based, connecting multiple classrooms in the worldwide campus," said Becky Vasquez, director of student and technology services at Embry-Riddle. "You have one instructor with students in two or three locations."

Eagle Vision saves the school money, since fewer instructors are needed, but it also allows classes to be taught in areas in which qualified instructors may be difficult to find, Vasquez said.

"With some campuses, we would have to cancel courses if not for Eagle Vision," she said.

Eagle Vision uses relatively inexpensive cameras and microphones to send pictures and sound over the Internet. But the video-conferencing systems use more elaborate equipment manufactured by Tandberg, a Norwegian company with dual headquarters in Oslo and New York City.

BusinessWeek magazine recently reported Tandberg has cornered 40 percent of the global video-conferencing market. That market totaled some $1.63 billion in 2007 but is expected to grow to $4.2 billion by 2012, according to the magazine.

The growth is predicted as more companies use the technology to conduct virtual meetings, rather than spend time and money to travel from one place to another.

B.J. West, a New Smyrna Beach-based representative of Interchange Technologies in New Jersey, is a distributor of Tandberg's video-conferencing systems.

"People want to reduce their travel costs, and video conferencing is a great 'green' initiative for companies," West said. "They can reduce their carbon footprint while also reducing their costs. It allows for faster decision-making and more flexibility in obtaining participants."

Tandberg focuses on the technology between the end points, or screens, in a video-conferencing set up, West said. "It's not just the large screens in conference rooms; the infrastructure is the brains of the system."

The technology has advanced so much that West uses a business-class cable modem at his home-office computer during his daily chats with Rick Green, a co-owner of Interchange Technologies.

"The key to video conferencing is to make it as useful and reliable as regular telephone calls," Green said. "Increases in (Internet) bandwidth are becoming more available to more companies, and makes video conferencing work a lot more easily."

The Volusia County School District makes extensive use of video-conference meetings, spokeswoman Nancy Wait said.

"We use it a couple of times a week," Wait said. "It helps reduce (driving) time and mileage costs."

The public school system has three main facilities that are equipped with Tandberg video-conferencing equipment: the administrative complex in DeLand, the educational development center in Daytona Beach, and a support-services complex on Olsen Drive in the middle of the county.

"The superintendent can have all the staff available (in all three buildings) without travel time," Wait said. "With such a large county, it's much easier to be able to go to one of these buildings than to drive all the way across the county to go to a meeting."