Networking: Londonderry airing for some far-out ideas
Paul Healy finds video-conferencing providing an edge to an Irish business drive on the Continent
FOR a graphic design company with international aspirations, being based in Londonderry is very much an edge-of-the-world situation. But Omega Design relies on computers and communications to overcome its remoteness.
The company specialises in graphics, print and packaging for clients such as Marks & Spencer and the American corporation Fruit of the Loom.
Using desktop conferencing, an Omega designer can sit at a computer screen in Londonderry presenting work to a client in Germany and making modifications, all across an ISDN telephone line. Managing director Ursula McGonagle explains the importance of the facility: "We know we can't just rely on our home market. We are now able to tender and compete for work in France and Germany, where even last year we wouldn't have thought it was viable. "For the future we intend to use video-conferencing to take briefs from clients."
Omega uses desktop conferencing software called Timbuktu from Farallon Computing - a basic example of a new genre of computing applications that allow people around the world to hold meetings while sitting at their desks.
At the other end of the spectrum are corporate video conferencing products, marrying video links with shared computer data and bringing many people together at once.Analysts claim that desktop conferencing is going to be one of the major computer applications of this decade. Ovum, for example, estimates that over 50 per cent of revenue from PC sales by the end of the decade will come from video PCs.
With so much at stake it is not surprising to find alliances being forged and millions pumped into R & D.Last month Compaq announced a strategic deal with the video conference specialist PictureTel to move its product on to PC networks. PictureTel is already a strategic partner of IBM, supplying its product as the video component of the remarkable new business conferencing application on the AS/400 mid-range computer. The conferenceinstigator books meetings on a calendar and, at the appointed time, the computer dials all those involved, ensures that the necessary resources and files are available, presents an agenda, and records and distributes minutes.
Software developer Connix SP, based in Mclean, Virginia, has decided to buy an AS/400 on the strength of the new features. Dave Beitzel, chief technology officer, explains why: "Frankly, this video-conferencing stuff is phenomenal. We are moving part of a division out to Washington State, and having the capability to video conference with my programmers will be crucial to making it work." In between the extremes of point-to-point and full video-conferencing products will be an array of intermediate applications. Olivetti's PCC is one already established in the U.K., thanks to a collaboration with British Telecom begun in 1992. It consists of a two-way or three-way voice and video link, file transfer, a computerised whiteboard and two-way form-filling capability; next year there are plans to launch a control unit providing conferencing facilities for up to 16 users across ISDN.
