Monday, February 1, 2010
Trends in 2010
Last year, we talked about communication enabled business processes (CEBP), and we expect to see more this year. The reason: By integrating videoconferencing capabilities into existing business applications, decisions get made faster, in a more collaborative environment and with business context. Companies will see long-term rewards, increased desicion velocity, increased productivity and growth by injecting visual communications into their business processes.
We expect to see more thin devices, including virtual desktops and cloud computing. Avistar already works with virtual desktop infrastructures such as Citrix and HP, offering, in some cases, the only videoconferencing solutions that work on those platforms. Voice and video communications architectures need to be fundamentally changed to adapt to VDI deployments, but we've been thinking ahead and already have this architecture in place. This helps businesses lower their support and operating costs, while becoming more eco-friendly.
And while we see many consumer based communication platforms embracing videoconferencing and driving adoption, businesses are thinking about manageability of bandwidth, performance, scalability and security. Companies will look for business-class videoconferencing that won't overwhelm their networks and related resources – while providing security, reporting and controls, that are essential in a business environment.
Avistar is well positioned to take advantage of these trends, and we’ll continue to report on our progress in this blog.
Stephen Epstein, Avistar CMO
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
A Bountiful Horizon
We find the recent industry consolidation news to be exhilarating. First, it is recognition of what we have been saying for years: This is a market with vast opportunity. Second, our position in the market as a desktop solution differentiates us greatly from the varied and numerous room and telepresence vendors. Our standards-based, interoperable solutions are vastly more cost effective than any other solution in the unified video collaboration space.
Although we have been in business for years, we are just getting started with integrating our solution into a variety of video-enabled UC solutions from multiple vendors. We have solved technology problems that these vendors didn’t even know they had, and we are positioned to grow our business through collaborative partnerships rather than going it alone. The partnerships that we have developed to date expose our solutions to a wider and more diverse audience, which will provide us with a greater opportunity for success.
As we expand our market into the virtual desktop environment through our work with Citrix and other VDI vendors, we will open up a field of new opportunities that will continue to differentiate Avistar. Our collective efforts will provide the company with multiple opportunities to open up new markets with new partners, all while giving us exposure among some of the biggest names in the technology/unified communications/video collaboration space. Our desktop products and video components are second-to-none in their adherence to standards and industry-leading interoperability.
As you can see, Avistar has a lot to look forward to in 2010 despite all the economic uncertainty. We have the ability to provide products that address all of the issues of the day: cost-effective performance, empowering employees with a greater productivity tool, a reduction in corporate travel that shrinks costs and improves employees’ lives — all while reducing a company’s carbon footprint. I can’t think of another technology solution that can offer such improvement in business, social and personal performance.
Thank you for all your efforts and interest in Avistar in 2009. We look forward to 2010.
By Bob Kirk, Avistar CEO
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
VoiceCon 2009 & New Product Launches
Industry events are always very important to Avistar. They are a cost effective way for us to get our message out, stay connected to our industry, meet new partners and catch up with old, and of course, launch new products. In the case of VoiceCon 2009, having it take place in our backyard (San Francisco) allows us to do more with this event than we typically do. This is largely due to the fact that our marketing, support and product teams are close by to lend a hand. Because of this (and a few other factors), we decided to launch our two latest products at VoiceCon (more on that in a moment).
Additionally, VoiceCon this year is focusing on many of the product and technology challenges that Avistar has been addressing for years now. Specifically, quality of experience and bandwidth management, with regard to delivering communications solutions. Because of this, Avistar’s CTO, Dr. Chris Lauwers was invited to participate on a quality of experience (QoE) panel at the event. We feel this is important as it demonstrates how Avistar is recognized as a leader in this field. A field that we pay very special attention to as we believe that consistent, high quality and scalable visual communications cannot be adequately delivered without addressing these issues head on. Again, something Avistar has been doing for years now, and we believe something that is unique in the industry and a key differentiator for our product line.
Now back to the product launches. We have launched two new products at VoiceCon. The first, Avistar C3 Unified ™ - Microsoft OCS Edition. This solution is geared toward Microsoft OCS users who require a scalable, economical and visually exciting desktop video conferencing experience, but would like to leverage the messaging, audio and desktop integration features that make Microsoft OCS a powerful platform. Our solution was developed to provide some very unique and critical video conferencing features that Microsoft OCS doesn’t address:
- Native interoperability between the desktop and room solutions (without a mediation server)
- Compatibility with industry standard MCU’s such as Avistar C3 Conference™ & Tandberg
- Elimination of media processing between non compatible endpoints
- Bandwidth management and call admission control
- Continuous presence multiparty video conferences
- Up to 720p/30 High Def video resolution
- Many other features
Avistar C3 Unified ™ – Microsoft OCS Edition will deliver a business class, industrial desktop visual communications experience that is integrated with OCS, leverages important OCS features (such as presence and single click calling), but at the same time, designed to make video conferencing on the OCS platform approachable, scalable, economical and exciting.
Our second product launch at Voicecon is the Avistar C3 Integrator ™ - Citrix Edition solution. This solution allows our Avistar C3 Media Engine™, and products like Avistar C3 Unified™ – OCS Edition to operate efficiently and effectively in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), such as Citrix. Here’s the thing with VDI environments, they truly offer stellar operational and environmental saving, and help to significantly simplify application management. But these VDI solutions achieve this by moving all the desktop applications into the datacenter. For business and data centric applications, this actually works very well. For applications such as desktop visual communications, where media processing, encoding and decoding have to happen on the desktop (to avoid overburdening the network and crushing the infrastructure), VDI architectures typically fall short. Some industry analysts have calculated that somewhere between 10-50 mbps are transmitting over the network for each uncompressed video stream. When scaling to 100’s or even 1000’s of users on a network, you can do the simple math. The network won’t be able to keep up with demand, business critical applications will fail, and the IT operations team will have a big challenge on their hands.
Avistar C3 Integrator™ solves these challenges by separating the media processing from the application. Our application continues to run back in the datacenter in the VDI environment, but a thin slice of our C3 Media Engine™ processes the video stream at the endpoint and ensures that no uncompressed data is transmitted over the network. Coupled with bandwidth management, our clients can now run 1000’s of users on their network, in HD, and within their VDI or Citrix environment, without the network being overloaded or business critical applications being affected by the desktop video conferencing experience. This is truly a win/win for our clients and the industry. We’ve been working directly with Citrix on this for some time now, and collectively feel this solution will propel desktop visual communications into VDI environments such as Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop, and will help drive adoption of what is now becoming a business critical application.
Clearly these are exciting times for Avistar, our industry, partners and clients. Voicecon allows us to get this message out and demonstrate these industry leading solutions, as well as our thought leadership in our field. If you’re around the show this week, please come see us at booth 620. We’ll be happy to demonstrate these solutions and talk shop.
Stephen Epstein, Avistar CMO
Monday, October 5, 2009
Unifying Communications
Conventional wisdom says that Unified Communications is about giving people a comprehensive portfolio of communications tools and providing a single unified user interface to these tools with the goal of making communications more effective, and of course "unified". For example, UC makes it easier to get a hold of someone on the first try, thereby reducing wasted time and improving business velocity.
While this is certainly a valuable aspect of Unified Communications, I believe it misses the bigger opportunity. The real promise of UC, in my opinion, is about finally turning communications into a software technology; rather than using software to provide a common user interface to a set of disjointed communications tools and appliances, the software itself becomes the “unified” communications tool.
The benefits of communications as a software capability are tremendous:
- First, a unified software platform allows for integration of communications software with other software applications, so that these software applications can provide the right context to the various parties communicating (this is typically referred to as contextual collaboration). This is about making communications a "first class citizen" in the workflow, if you will (call center software has historically done this well, but there are many more untapped opportunities in other applications).
- Second, it allows for the inverse: the capturing and recording of communications, and making recorded interactions part of the "context" that gets saved in enterprise databases. This translates "people memory" into "corporate memory", and enables much more efficient context switching between different people in an organization (e.g. multiple people providing the same role at different times, "hand-off" between time zones of tasks that get worked on 24/7, etc.)
- Finally (and often overlooked): it becomes possible to keep track of the real interactions that go on every day in an organization and extract common interaction patterns. These interaction patterns point out who the real information gatekeepers are in an organization, who the go-to people are, and who are the movers and shakers. Forget social networking software: let the system figure out where the real links are in an organization, independent of organizational boundaries.
This “communications as a software feature” drives much of Avistar’s product strategy. For example, the Avistar C3 Media Engine (and our associated Visual Insights program) is designed to video-enable a wide variety of software applications, web-based or with a rich user interface, running on PCs or on thin clients, If you have a need for interactive voice or video in your software application, sign up for our Visual Insights program and give our Media Engine a try! I assure you, you'll gain a whole new perspective on unified communications. The benefits of getting UC right are very compelling, see it for yourself.
http://www.avistar.com/products/Video-Conferencing-System-106.html
Chris Lauwers, Avistar CTO
Monday, September 21, 2009
Tales from the Test Lab
Part 1 : Converting SIP to H.323
Historically, legacy Avistar products were based on a mix of traditional and more recent standards. We used some features of SIP for call signaling, but any interoperability with H.323 endpoints required that we send analog audio and video through a non-Avistar hardware gateway device.
As part of an ongoing cost reduction and standardization effort we have moved away from analog video and 3rd party hardware gateway boxes, and built our own software SIP to H.323 gateway module. This has been a bit of an adventure as we have been learning some of the things that H.323 and SIP do differently, and have had to deal with resulting incompatibilities.
‘Fun’ issue #1: hold/resume standards (or lack thereof).
Avistar has long had the ability to hold and resume a call in progress. This used to be done in a proprietary way and we more or less assumed that the SIP and H.323 worlds had standard ways to do this. What we found is that many endpoints haven’t implemented hold/resume at all, and for those that have, there have been different approaches used. Some endpoints will leave the media channels open during a hold session and send a still image and/or some sort of looping music. This approach is the easiest to deal with as there is no manipulation of call states, but it wastes bandwidth and is annoying if a held participant is sending audio and video into a multi-party call.
Another approach some SIP endpoints use to go on hold is to say that the IP address is temporarily 0.0.0.0. Yet another approach is to say that the send channel is temporarily ‘receive only’. An example of debate over hold/resume functionality can be found here. As you might imagine, with multiple approaches, implementing a solution that works well with all other endpoints has been involved. When an endpoint goes on hold and the other side knows it, what should it display? In some cases they will make the picture go black, other times they will continue to show a frozen image of the last frame of video, and in some cases, a special held call graphic will be shown. When a call is using firewall traversal a held state runs the risk of being marked as ‘idle’ by the firewall transit servers and terminated unless you make sure to let those intermediate servers know that it really is still a valid call and the media is intentionally stopped for now. Another nuance of hold/resume is dealing with muted audio. If someone muted their audio before going on hold, they generally want the mute to automatically be undone when the call is resumed. Still another concern is over H.239 presentations coming through the gateway. When a SIP endpoint goes on hold it can stop the presentation video various ways, and the H.323 endpoint may or may not automatically try to resume the presentation when the call is restarted.
‘Fun’ issue #2: figuring out which CODECs both sides want to use.
When different endpoints start a call between each other, they pass back and forth lists of audio and video CODECs they support and they negotiate which is the best match to use for this particular call. The way this is done in the SIP world is a bit different from the way it is done in the H.323 world. With SIP, there is the concept of ‘SDP offered pTypes’. Each CODEC is assigned a pType number, some of which are standard, and some of which are up to the endpoint to decide. With H.323 there is an analogous concept but it is done with lists of H.245 capability OIDs. Some endpoints will offer a CODEC with a certain pType and then during the back and forth handshake, change their mind and offer the same CODEC with a different pType. This causes complications because the gateway in between is trying to build a translation between the two ways (H.323 and SIP) of describing the CODECs and if the index numbers are being changed during the negotiation in can be stuck with out of date information.
An example of discussion over SDP CODEC negotiation can be found here. Some of the implementation and testing to make this all work ends up in gray areas, where the RFCs say things like “…RTCP stream SHOULD use the next higher (odd) destination port number…” When the RFCs that drive implementation use words like ‘should’ (instead of ‘must’) then some vendors opt to diverge from the suggestions, but others assume that they will be followed. We try to make products that can cope with differing ways to do things, but sometimes there is no way to successfully act as an intermediary when the two sides aren’t playing by the same set of rules.
I need to get back to testing, so discussion of other things like presence propagation, dial plans, DID and such will have to wait for another day.
- TomG in Test
Tom Griner heads up Avistar's Quality Assurance Group.
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Virtual Environments & Desktop Communications.
For organizations to become truly virtual, however, they not only need to provide users with access to their applications, they also need to provide users with access to other users—their coworkers, their partners, their customers, their suppliers. Desktop videoconferencing technology allows “virtual” access to users by providing a face-to-face experience across the network and allowing users to interact as if they were virtually in the same location.
Unfortunately, desktop videoconferencing and VDI do not always co-exist nicely. Using a VDI architecture for desktop video, video compression and decompression tasks are relegated to application servers in the data center, and uncompressed video is sent between the server and terminal, which puts excessive loads on the network. For example, an uncompressed CIF video stream running at 30fps uses approximately 50Mb/s. This makes desktop videoconferencing over VDI impossible in wide-area environments and impractical at best in local area deployments. The lesson learnt here: although VDI and VAI environments offer truly compelling saving and productivity enhancements, they can introduce some considerable drawbacks for mission critical solutions, such as desktop communications.
Fortunately, Avistar will introduce VDI-enabled desktop video products to address these challenges; Specifically, Avistar is planning a Citrix-enabled version of the Avistar C3™ solution that will enable the full Avistar suite of voice and video communications software on Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop. This solution will also enable other desktop video technologies such as Microsoft OCS to be deployed on Citrix as well. Another lesson learnt here: if applications such as desktop communications can be made aware of these VAI/VDI environments, they can be engineered in a way to leverage the VAI/VDI benefits, while dealing directly with the challenges that are introduced by these environments. The result is a win / win situation where the end user gets full desktop video communications capabilities, while the IT organization delivers the on the scalability, cost saving and environmental benefits that VAI/VDI have to offer.
So, there you have it: Avistar will provide the missing link that will enable organizations to become truly virtual by providing access not just to remote applications but also to remote people, all using the same VDI/VAI desktop architecture.
Comments and questions welcomed...
Chris Lauwers, Avistar CTO
Monday, August 24, 2009
An Open Forum
Although Avistar as a company and our industry have gone through numerous changes over the years, our guiding principles remain unchanged. We recognize that the world around us is changing, people are becoming more distributed, our economy is exerting pressure on the business community and the global environment is showing signs of tremendous change. These challenges only reinforce our commitment and support our guiding principles.
In support of these principles, we have decided to re-launch our corporate blog as an open industry blog, a place where people within Avistar and within our industry can share their perspectives, experiences and learning’s. This blog isn’t intended to express the opinion of one person, but instead allow all of us to share information that we can all benefit from. We are hoping this can be a place where our industry works together to solve challenges in very innovative ways, discuss approaches and make progress as a group.
With that said, we do plan to post blogs from our executives, engineers, product managers, industry analysts and you. On that note, if you as a reader would like to post to this blog, please send your ideas and content to: blog@avistar.com or just comment to this or any other blog post.
Let’s make this blog a great place to communicate and collaborate. After all, isn’t that what our industry is all about?
Stephen Epstein, CMO – Avistar Communications