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"It's really about bridging the universes of video conferencing and video streaming," Alegre-Kimura told internetnews.com. "It's the element of interoperability that appeals to customers. The conference platform, the streaming server and now the video media center are all Polycom. It all fits together."
Instead of harboring all these videos in silo applications and servers, an organization's entire catalog of video content is kept in one location where it can be distributed over a corporate network, streamed on the Internet or stored away until the next crop of new hires is ready for their human resources training videos.
"The enterprise video has come out of nowhere and it's huge," Mukul Krishna, an analyst at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Frost & Sullivan, told internetnews.com. "No one really knows what to do with all this content. A company like [General Motors] was making more videos than all of Hollywood combined. It's that big."
Frost & Sullivan estimates that enterprise customers spent more than $200 million for digital asset management technology in 2006, with between $45 million and $75 million invested specifically for video-content management. The business research and consulting firm expects the digital-asset management market will surge to more than $500 million by 2010.
"A lot of the time, this stuff is just sitting somewhere in a cavernous archive where no one can find it," Krishna said. "Or it just languishes on some storage system buried somewhere in the organization where people forget all about it."
Enterprise customers can use their existing Polycom video-conferencing equipment as well as other standards-based H.323 conferencing equipment to create a video in standard- or high-definition format. The video can then be streamed in real time or stored for video-on-demand users.
Krishna predicts the digital asset management industry is poised for an intense period of consolidation as players, such as Microsoft, IBM, EMC and HP scramble for their share of this emerging market.
Polycom said Video Media Center 1000, set to be unveiled this week at the Infocomm Conference and Expo in Anaheim, Calif., will be available through its channel partners next month and will cost around $95,000 per unit.
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