EDITORIAL
2011 was a year of great change in the VC world, and superb growth—see later in this issue good news from Video Guidance, BCS Gobal and Polycom.  It looked as if the technology was finally coming of age as it became seen as a product that wasn’t just reserved for those enterprises that boasted their own support staff. It seemed as if it might be becoming a technology that anyone can own, and anyone can use. However, as our lead story makes clear, beware of just who you entrust your technology to, and who can access it.

As our story from Rapid7 makes clear, some video conferencing systems in boardrooms and conference rooms might well be compromised, allowing hackers to listen to and watch events unfolding when the participants thought they were unobserved.

This comes as no surprise to most professionals in the VC marketplace, I’m sure. Indeed my personal experience prepared me for this.  Soon after I got involved in this market, I was given some desktop client software by one of the major manufacturers. I was more than a little startled to find that it allowed me to access one of the vendors own conference rooms, where I was able to observe a meeting in progress—until I spoiled things by driving the remote camera, at which point the meeting participants noticed and terminated the session.

Surely it isn’t beyond the wit of man to ensure that the default setting for all conference setups is “private”?

However it really does seem that the much promoted VC on personal devices really is poised to take off,  as Michael Werch of Video Guidance told us exclusively (see article).

You can now access all of our lists of VC System Integrators and Resellers, split by territories throughout the world. It seems there are remarkably few of them! So come on, if you are providing Video Collaboration solutions to users, send us your details and we’ll add you to the list … and it’s free!

Thanks for reading TP&VC Insight

Keith Warburton
editor@vcinsight.com