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Why rental, rather than purchase, may be your best ticket to a videoconferencing system

A videoconferencing purchase has obvious advantages for many organizations, but for others, the need is not so clear.

Some have trouble justifying a large investment in something they would use only occasionally. Others who might benefit more question the value of the technology.

“For a lot of people, videoconferencing has been a pretty uncomfortable experience,” says Jimmy LoMonaco, Director of Rental Operations for Conference Technologies, Inc.®. “We find that’s often the case for those using older systems or systems set up by suppliers who don’t know how to size a screen properly, don’t have enough experience with audio systems or who don’t really understand IP networks.”

For these clients, rental can be a much better option than purchase. “The technology can have enormous value,” adds LoMonaco, “but you need to get started in a sensible way.”

Assessing the need

LoMonaco says the point of using any videoconference is to avoid the costs of travel. That may include the direct cost of airfare, hotels and so on, but the real issue is lost productivity. “If I have to fly to Chicago for a two-hour meeting, it’s going to kill the whole day. Whereas with one of these systems, it literally takes only two hours.”

LoMonaco says CTI approaches new clients with the goal of providing simple-to-use, cost-effective solutions, believing long-term relationships can be built only in this way.

CTI is able to fit a solution precisely to a client’s needs because of the wide range of services we offer, including equipment rental, room rental, equipment sales, system design and installation, and bridging and gateway services. Since conferencing systems today are normally IP, rather than ISDN-based, we’ve invested in the training it takes to bring our technicians up to speed in configuring networks. We also belong to a number of site-rental services, so we can literally put a client in a videoconferencing room in almost any city in the world.

“We are and have always been very good at losing videoconferencing clients for our rental department,” LoMonaco adds.  “That’s because we do sales and integration as well as rental and service. If you have a need but you haven’t quite proven that it’s advantageous to buy, fine. Rent it from me for a while, and only when you’re ready, buy it. We can help you no matter what.”

Varying needs

It’s often the case that CTI customers continue their relationship with our rental department even after purchasing installed systems. LoMonaco cites the example of a Fortune 500 company in St. Louis whose needs are complex but vary from month to month.  

“This client has 300 physical locations around the world. They run a monthly managers meeting which everyone needs to see and hear, but generally only requires presentations from two or three offices.”

CTI Rental designed a protocol putting a multi-point conferencing system in the client’s headquarters each month, shipping usually two additional systems to the locations that need them, and then encoding the video and audio from the conference and streaming over their WAN out to about 100 other managers who watch the meeting from their office PCs. Unfortunately our client can’t put everyone in the same room or put videoconferencing systems everywhere,” says LoMonaco. “Still, these managers are at the meeting. They see the presentations and they can have input via email or text messaging that’s part of the streaming system.”

The system, LoMonaco says,  “is relatively easy to set up, because we can operate within the company’s wide-area network. There are no firewalls to transverse. We work directly with our client’s network administrator to make sure everything is configured properly, and we’ve been able to walk the branch offices through their systems’ setup over the telephone.”

LoMonaco says firewall transversal is more complex, and so when CTI needs to rent a remote system that will operate over the public Internet, “we can and we have sent a technician out, or we can work with a qualified partner located in that city.” To simplify these setups, CTI recently purchased firewall transversal equipment that can solve roughly 80 - 90% of common firewall problems.

The client in question recently built a new headquarters and asked CTI to outfit their boardroom with a permanently installed system. “They reached a stage where a purchase made a lot of sense,” says LoMonaco, “and they decided we were the obvious firm to do the installation.”  That did not end their relationship with CTI Rental, however. “We still ship systems to their branch offices each month and we still supply the webcasting gear on a rental basis,” he says.

“Actually, renting gear from an integration company makes an awful lot of sense in this case and in many others. The systems integrator knows the customer well, knows his needs and knows his system inside and out. There’s no wasted time or money fitting the rental to an unknown quantity.”

HD and other advanced technology

LoMonaco says CTI has begun the process of converting rental rooms and rental inventory to high-definition systems. We are also in the process of upgrading our bridging and gateway service to HD.

“Actually very few public conferences can take advantage of HD today,” LoMonaco admits. “The infrastructure just isn’t out there yet. On the other hand, all of the HD systems will handle standard-definition calls, and they actually handle them at a higher quality level, because they’re starting with better cameras and more stable algorithms.”

When it’s possible, the advantages of conferencing in high definition are immediately obvious. “These systems are so good that, when we demo them, people we’re faking it somehow. For instance, we have a demo site that we connect to called ‘the fish tank,’ where the codec manufacturer has aimed a camera at an aquarium. It looks like you’re watching ‘Finding Nemo;’ it’s that good. People have asked us if that isn’t really a DVD.” That level of quality is meaningful in a videoconference because it makes it possible see subtle facial expressions, especially when you’re viewing the conference on a larger display. “The point of videoconferencing has always been to replicate a face to face encounter. Now we’re finally to the point where we’re doing that.”

Still in some ways, explaining the advantages of high definition is an uphill battle. “Many people don’t understand what they can do even with standard-definition systems. They come to us looking for face-to-face contact, not realizing they can do anything over video that they could in a single-site meeting.”

CTI rental customers can, if they choose, show PowerPoint presentations or spreadsheets from their laptops, video from a tape, laptop or DVD and reports or brochures on a document camera. If they’re renting a CTI facility for a meeting, they don’t even have to ask about it – all of these capabilities and more are built in.

“We realize our rooms are overkill for what we can charge in today’s marketplace,” says LoMonaco, “but that’s because we build them as demonstration rooms for our integration clients as well as for our own meetings.”

Renting the expertise

LoMonaco says that the company’s technical knowledge puts it in a place that few rental companies can be. “I’m not going to say that we’re the only place where you can rent a videoconferencing system,” he says, “but, because of our systems integration business, we’re one of the few rental houses with a deep understanding of the medium. What you’re most typically renting from us is the expertise - the ability to understand what needs to happen in your network and how to make this call happen.” 

For that reason, CTI is by far the largest videoconferencing supplier in St. Louis and becoming that in other areas we serve.

“We can be turnkey,” LoMonaco says.  “If you came to me and said, ‘I don’t have any videoconferencing knowledge or capabilities and I need to set up a conference from here to Washington or from here to New Zealand,’ we could do that for you, in one stop, under one bill. Or if you came to me and said, ‘I need to set up a videoconference where I have 15 different participants in 15 different parts of the world,’ we could set the whole thing up. Absolutely.”

Conference Technologies Inc.®  ~   Creating A Vision For Technology