OREANDA-NEWS. August 24, 2010. CROC recently deployed a video conferencing system in the conference hall, meeting rooms, and executive offices of Shtokman Development AG. Thanks to the new system, employees of the Moscow office can now communicate daily with shareholders and colleagues in Russia, France, and Norway, as well as with remote subcontractors and partners.

Shtokman Development AG — a joint venture established by OAO "Gazprom" (Russia), Total S.A. (France), and Statoil ASA (Norway) — certainly cannot do without modern communication technologies. The video conferencing system is used in the conference hall and meeting rooms several hours a day and helps to reduce the company’s expenditures on business trips in Russia and around Europe. Another key business advantage of the adopted video conferencing technology is speedier decision-making.

Michael Nikiforov, Head of CROC's Videoconferencing Sector, said: "Both the government and the enterprise sectors value video conferencing for fast deployment and short-term return on investment in addition to time savings on business trips for top managers and professionals. The trend is illustrated by our projects and reports by IDC, Wainhouse Research, and Frost & Sullivan analytics agencies, with the videoconferencing segment growing by 16-20 percent in 2009, while the general IT market shrank. In my opinion, in the short-term video conferencing (as part of a unified communications business environment) will become a driver of the enterprise networking market."

The new video conferencing system is based on Polycom and TANDBERG solutions and supports multipoint sessions via IP and ISDN. ISDN channel compatibility is especially useful when working with contractors as it unifies telephone communications with data exchanges and does not require additional equipment or network setup. In order to make an ISDN call, a caller only needs to know the subscriber's video terminal number.