Europe ready to meet online
Visual Nexus adapts affordable Japanese video technology for European market
Guildford-based vendor Visual Nexus has claimed to have launched the first software in Europe to provide affordable online meeting technology for SMEs, creating installation and managed service provision opportunities for resellers.
Japanese firm Tomen Cyber Business (TCB) developed an online meeting server for its home market that allows small businesses to conduct video meetings online.
Last month the firm appointed Geoff Seabrook to generate sales outside Japan.
Seabrook set up Visual Nexus and advised the founders on tailoring the product for European markets. Visual Nexus redesigned the coder/decoder technology to adapt the product.
"In Japan it's not uncommon for end-users to have 10MB connections to their homes," Seabrook said.
"Businesses have far more bandwidth. We worked with TCB to build special codecs for the European product. Now it's possible to have a two way videostream running over the existing bandwidth."
Seabrook predicted that there will be massive demand for the new video meeting technology, and claimed Visual Nexus's partners will have two ways of making money.
"The most obvious solution is to resellers to offer this as a managed service to end-users. Most companies find they have only a fraction of the bandwidth they thought they had. Resellers can usually sort these problems out and then win a contract to manage the service on top," he said.
"They also have the option of tailoring the service for clients by inserting corporate colours and logos on the screens."
John Cooper, managing director of reseller JKC, said Visual Nexus is helping make online meetings more accessible, but that there are still considerable hurdles to be overcome.
"The biggest challenge is that video should work around people, not the other way round. These days it's possible to get video streams going both ways, so it's much more like a real face-to-face conversation.
"People can talk over each other, rather than conduct the stilted exchanges that occur on video at the moment," he said.