A decade ago, videoconferencing could be found primarily in expensive corporate boardrooms.
These days, videoconferencing can be found in cloud-based computing environments.
The benefits of videoconferencing include: increasing productivity, reducing costs and the hassles of traveling while enhancing relationships among employees, customers and partners.
Cloud-based videoconferencing brings additional benefits, including:
An important benefit of cloud-based videoconferencing is scalability. One-on-one video chats via free services are fine when talking with family members or friends, but the quality of the experience can be less than impressive. What’s worse, if you need to connect to multiple people on a single call. With other solutions, the number of endpoints on a call is limited by the capacity of the Multipoint Control Unit (MCU), which can often be expensive, using inflexible hardware appliances.
But now, your company or your cloud provider can link any number of Avistar C3 Conference MCUs, because we’ve developed the industry first all-software MCU, which is more cost-effective, easily upgradeable and more flexible. Each of our all-software MCUs can run on physical or virtual servers in the data center, and together these MCUs form one virtual “mega-MCU” that accommodates all your endpoints. You can scale up or scale down, based on demand—something only an all-software MCU can do. The result: scalability that is essentially unlimited, whether deployed in-house or via the cloud.
As you add more endpoints, the Avistar virtual MCU gets more efficient. Avistar C3 Conference also delivers critical multiparty video conferencing features such as transcoding and transrating for each participant in every conference. The experience perfectly matches the capabilities of each endpoint and no resources are wasted. This is important because with some solutions, a critical question is whether your network can handle the back-and-forth nature of video traffic. Our built-in bandwidth solutions have it covered.
This changes a lot. Now enterprise quality videoconferencing can be achieved at cost point that is a fraction of what “quality” videoconferencing used to cost. And now capacity can seamlessly follow demand without the burden and cost of over-provisioning in order to ensure that service capacity is matching demand. It’s a whole new way of thinking about videoconferencing. Think about it!
Avistar has been recognized by Frost & Sullivan with the 2011 Global New Product Innovation Award in Desktop Videoconferencing.
The Avistar C3 Integrator™ solution has been designed to deliver a scalable desktop videoconferencing experience within virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). Avistar’s approach to detecting the VDI deployment, automatically extending its media processing capabilities to the endpoint, while its desktop videoconferencing application runs within the virtual desktop, has been recognized by Frost & Sullivan as an important innovation in the desktop videoconferencing industry. In addition Frost & Sullivan has recognized the Avistar C3 Conference™ solution for its ability to provide on-demand multiparty conferencing capabilities within virtualized and cloud solutions.
Stephen Epstein, CMO, Avistar, said, “Avistar has long been committed to delivering reliable, scalable and secure desktop videoconferencing solutions to its enterprise clients and technology partners. Because of this, Avistar clearly recognized the technical challenges as the unified communications (UC) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) sectors started to converge. We’ve successfully developed and subsequently deployed the industry’s leading suite of virtual visual communications solutions to enterprises globally. This success and the growing demand for virtual visual communications led Citrix to license Avistar’s technology, which in turn has been recognized by Frost & Sullivan. Our innovation and leadership in this industry is vital to our long-term growth and success. Being recognized with this award not only makes us proud of our achievements, but it also leaves us with a great sense of accomplishment.”
Rob Arnold, Senior Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said, “VDI solutions have proven to be effective methods of centralizing business productivity and line-of-business applications. However, bandwidth and performance challenges have hampered many attempts to support real-time communications applications in VDI environments. Avistar has addressed these issues by allowing organizations to reap the operational and user benefits of both VDI and videoconferencing simultaneously.”
Congratulations to everyone on the Avistar team for a job very well done.
As we begin to wind down a very exciting year at Avistar, it’s time for us to take a look into 2012 and the trends we believe will most significantly impact the videoconferencing sector. Personal videoconferencing, virtual environments such as virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) and cloud-based services, and bandwidth management will be key topics for enterprise customers and our technology partner – all driven by the need to increase productivity, decrease operating costs and leverage business assets in a real-time and collaborative business environment. Let’s delve more into these trends.
• Videoconferencing will continue to be virtually everywhere – Businesses have embraced cloud computing and the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) to improve workforce collaboration, control costs and deliver software tools that are essential to improved employee productivity, regardless of location or device. The next phase is on-demand videoconferencing cloud- and VDI-enabled services that are available to any business, delivered through industry- leading infrastructure, network and application service providers.
• The speed of change is increasing – Over the past three years, the industry has moved from hardware-based conference room solutions to software-only videoconferencing on laptops to conducting calls on tablets. This rate of change will continue and price/performance ratios will improve, driven by the cloud and increased connectivity on all sorts of devices. To take advantage of the rapid change (and to be able to rapidly change), companies should seek out videoconferencing solutions that take an all-software approach – as opposed to more expensive and less flexible hardware-based solutions.
• Consumerization of technology continues to drive business adoption – Computers were not conceived as a consumer device. Now consumers drive technology adoption, downloading and testing free apps and services and demanding more intuitive user interfaces. Enterprise apps such as business-class videoconferencing will continue to become more user-friendly while delivering reliable, secure and scalable videoconferencing capabilities built to meet business needs.
• BYOD will go mainstream – Information technology departments traditionally limited the types of devices they offered employees (and allowed employees to use on their networks) based upon the belief that it was inefficient and complicated to support too many platforms or systems. With the need to be flexible and drive down costs, IT departments are rethinking these outdated policies. Today, employees expect to BYOD – Bring Your Own Devices – and have them sync with their corporate technology. That means IT departments must support Windows, iOS, Mac, Android and Linux devices and machines. That means that companies must select cross-platform solutions that can be securely delivered. Once again, the virtual desktop comes to the rescue.
• Videoconferencing solutions need to get along and play nicely – As more businesses rely on videoconferencing, interoperability, availability and scalability become critical. Solutions that are not based upon industry standards such as SIP and H.264, for example, will increase the cost of videoconferencing. Emerging unified communications platforms not based on industry standards or not fully interoperable will create significant barriers to adoption. Videoconferencing solutions that can cost-effectively break down these interoperability barriers will emerge as important unifying strategies and find quicker paths to adoption on a broad basis.
• Bandwidth on the run – As more users rely on videoconferencing wherever they are, there will be more stress on data plans as well as corporate networks. Bandwidth usage, even via the cloud, becomes a cost issue as IT departments also must ensure that increased usage from outside the network does not impact security or critical business applications. Companies need to select communications solutions that provide robust bandwidth management, call admission control, user policy support, threshold and utilization modeling, in addition to extensive reporting and forecasting capabilities.
Businesses in 2012 want anytime, anywhere videoconferencing that works with any device, that can be delivered securely and that will not negatively impact their networks. CFOs want solutions that are economical with a proven ROI, while CEOs and COOs want enhanced productivity and creativity. With convergence and availability of all these technologies, 2012 certainly will emerge as an important year for the videoconferencing industry and businesses alike.
2012 will most certainly be an important year for our industry. We look forward to many more exciting developments as we watch these trends, and hopefully predictions unfold over the course of the year.
See you in 2012.
Happy Holidays from the Avistar team.
It’s been an exciting week here at Citrix Synergy. Citrix and its partners have been demonstrating an extensive catalog of virtualalized applications, sharing information and looking at the future of desktop, server and cloud virtualization.
At Avistar we’ve taken the next step in our virtualized strategy as we’ve established a deeper relationship with Citrix through their licensing of our technology. We’ve also announced that our industry award winning videoconferencing MCU, Avistar C3 Conference is now fully virtualized and runs on virtual servers such as Citrix XenServer.
In addition to all this great news and information, Deutsche Bank won the Citrix Synergy Innovation award. You can see a video outlining Deutsche Bank’s innovative use of the Citrix technology at:
http://www.citrix.com/lang/English/lp/lp_1859448.asp
Deutsche Bank also presented their approach to the virtualized desktop which included an overview of their use of Avistar’s technology across the bank.
We congratulate Deutsche Bank on a job well done!
For those of you attending Citrix Synergy, we welcome you to pass by our booth #522 and see all these great Avistar virtualized videoconferencing solutions in action.
This “blog” commentary includes statements, opinions and analysis relating to Avistar’s business, industry and emerging trends, and thereby contains forward-looking statements.
These forward-looking statements, and all other statements that are not historical facts that may be contained in these materials, are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially.
Please refer to the Risk Factors contained in our SEC filings on Forms 10K and 10Q for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ.