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