That was the question posed to the IVCi executive team, and executives at video conferencing equipment manufacturers Polycom and TANDBERG. The following are the responses from these business leaders.

The Economic Stimulus Act signed by President Bush on February 13, 2008 helps businesses in two ways. It gives companies a 50% bonus deduction on shorter life property placed in service in 2008. And it increases -- to $250,000 from $128,000 in 2008 -- the section 179 limit on expenses that small businesses can deduct from annual income, with a total cap of $800,000.

AV integrated rooms with control systems are a central component of buildings that are built to be energy efficient. When designing buildings that are green and comply with LEED standards, it is important to consider the design needs of an audio visual integrated room early in the process because most systems cannot be made to retrofit your build. Include green solutions in each of your building designs and you will stay ahead of the curve.

For organizations migrating to High Definition (HD) video and audio communication, the Polycom HDX 8006 provides a flexible and robust solution ideally suited for applications such as distance education, remote medical diagnosis, on demand project collaboration, and more.

The ultimate telepresence experience. Beautiful, immersive and simple, the T3 is visual collaboration taken to an entirely new level. Thousands of details work together to provide an exclusive, natural forum so you can meet as if you are in the same room.

We have experienced in-house technicians and product experts who are available to provide additional support; we find this gives our customers a sense of comfort, and the belief that we understand their needs and can address their problem quickly and accurately.

Centrally manage and deploy visual communications across your entire organization - desktop to conference room.

Video communications is expanding beyond the conference room and is becoming a standard communication tool and part of the daily workflow for individuals and work groups. This trend is being driven by the integration of video communications into the IP networks of commercial, educational, and government organizations and is having a profound impact on the management and scalability requirements of these video-enabled networks. The increasing demand for visual communications requires networks to support tens of thousands of users and video devices instead of a relatively small number of conference rooms.

This has changed with the advent of the 21st century meeting room. Today the new breed of collaborative platforms enable the ability to create connected meeting rooms where distributed staff can instantly join a virtual conference, share any application and write on it using digital ink, participate in discussions and save and distribute their work as if they were in the same room. These technologies are designed for business applications - and offer the ability to regain the freedom to work freely on a surface with content, ideas, and other material, and manage/manipulate that content in the digital realm.

Video is leaving the video conference room and becoming a standard communication tool and part of the individual's daily workflow. In turn, this trend is having a profound impact on the scalability requirements of the visual communication system which now must support tens of thousands of users where once it only had to support several dozen or at most a few hundred video rooms.