 provided the boost that interactive multimedia communications needed, and market growth resulted. A 2004 study by Wainhouse Research, an independent market research firm that specializes in the rich-media conferencing and communications fields, found that 31% of workers had participated in interactive video communication. Nearly three-quarters of respondents to a Wainhouse survey declared that videoconferencing use had increased in the last year; even more believed that it would increase in the coming year. Only about 30% cited expense as a major barrier to videoconferencing, and less than 18% found that integration or reliability issues were major barriers. Companies that have historically maintained separate voice and data networks are now converging voice onto data networks. More than half of the decision-makers polled by Nemertes Research, a research firm that specializes in analyzing the business impact of technology, declared that their corporations want to converge networks specifically to include videoconferencing. More than a third intend to implement unified communications (UM) and nearly a third intend to implement collaborative tools. Nearly half of companies want carriers to offer managed services, nearly 20% are interested in hosted applications, and more than 10% want wireless integration services. The Nemertes Research study found that network convergence reduced annual local-loop costs by $9,600-$28,000 per site for large organizations, and by $4,800-$9,600 for midsize companies. Service providers are trying to keep up. They anticipate investing nearly $5 billion in next-generation voice equipment between 2004 and 2007. Although voice over An Introduction to Video Communications Internet protocol (VoIP) softswitches, media gateways, and signaling gateways will consume the majority of that, by 2006, that investment will shift to complementary services (such as video communication). Camera Codec Public Switched Services or Preprocessing Dedicated Lines Encoding Codec Decoding Postprocessing Figure