Psytechnics Survey Reveals Video Conferencing Taking Center Stage in Enterprises

Just Under Half of Respondents Are Deploying Video Conferencing Now With a Further 40 Percent Considering It for the Future

Video conferencing is fast becoming an essential application in the enterprise as businesses strive to reduce their carbon footprints and reduce travel expenses. A survey conducted by Psytechnics, a leader in voice and video performance management solutions for IT operations, revealed that video conferencing is in deployment or pilot phase and being seriously considered for the future in over 80 percent of the organizations questioned.

"Video conferencing is an obvious alternative to the pollution, wasted travel time and cash costs incurred by millions of business travellers -- but the remote working experience often times falls short. Transmission issues such as blocking, freezing, and jerkiness in the video or poor audio quality can greatly compromise the users' experience. If executives can't effectively communicate with colleagues and customers using video conferencing, the benefits may not seem worth the investment," said Peter Brockmann, President, Brockmann & Company, a customer insight firm.

"End user perception of the video and audio quality will make or break the application's utilization in the enterprise," said Mike Hollier, CTO and Founder of Psytechnics. "Many organizations are moving to unified communications, including video conferencing, to improve collaboration and organizational productivity, cut costs and be green. Realizing these benefits depends on reliably delivering business grade communication -- the quality of the experience is critical. Let's face it, if a video conference is to effectively replace a face-to-face meeting we can't tolerate poor voice or video quality. Maintaining the required level of video and audio quality during a video conference will ensure user satisfaction, better productivity, and instil confidence in the continued and expanded use of the application. Equally efficient delivery of the necessary quality requires rapid detection and diagnosis of any end user impacting issues."

Video and audio application performance management based on users' actual, real-time experience provides highly accurate detection and root cause diagnosis of issues that could affect the user experience. Psytechnics' unique visibility into the application specific behavior for all user calls enables operational and support teams to work proactively, and with significantly greater levels of success, resolving user issues in a tenth of the time it would typically take using network management or QoS (quality of service) based diagnostics.

Psytechnics' support for 650,000+ IP Telephony seats and its delivery of highly accurate measurements of end user quality-of-experience based data -- validated against Psytechnics' extensive library of real human quality judgements -- provides the most reliable basis for decision making for video conferencing operations and support.

About Psytechnics

Psytechnics is the leader in voice and video performance management solutions, enabling Telecom Operators and Enterprises to proactively manage end user call quality as well as operations and support efficiency for IP Telephony, Video Conferencing, and Unified Communications in fixed, mobile and converged environments.

Psytechnics' Experience Manager is a comprehensive solution for voice and video performance management and troubleshooting, providing real-time, objective, call analysis that details the actual user experience, delivering right first time 'find-and-fix' capability. Experience Manager focuses on application specific IP characteristics as well as tangible user detectable factors such as noise, delay, distortion and echo that combine to determine the overall user perceived quality of experience.

Psytechnics' technology has contributed to seven ITU-T standards and is extensively validated against the opinions of more than 500,000 real users performing subjective tests in the company's own state-of-the-art testing facilities.

Psytechnics' voice and video performance management products are deployed worldwide in enterprise, mobile and next generation networks, enabling differentiated services, voice SLA monitoring and compliance, intelligent interconnect selection and rapid diagnosis and troubleshooting. The company was spun out of BT in December 2000 and is headquartered in Ipswich, UK, with US offices in New Hampshire.

Notes to editors:

1. Psytechnics' survey of 250 telecommunications professionals conducted in August 2008 revealed that over 40 percent of the respondents are deploying video conferencing now and a further 42 percent are considering it for the future.