Introducing Avistar C3 Conference™ for Microsoft Lync

This week, we are exhibiting at Citrix Synergy, where we  introduced the industry’s first fully virtualized multiparty videoconferencing solution designed for Microsoft Lync. The picture above was taken on the show floor with endpoints participating from Avistar, Citrix, HP & Wyse.

The Avistar C3 Conference for Microsoft Lync solution extends the multiparty videoconferencing experience and interoperability capabilities of Microsoft Lync while supporting virtualized deployments. It is designed to expand the capabilities of the Microsoft Lync UC platform, while enabling clients and partners to enhance their UC features within a virtualized server environment, such as Citrix XenServer. As the solution is based entirely on an all-software design, it can be deployed using standards based hardware, on premises or within a cloud environment. Additionally, the Avistar C3 Conference for Microsoft Lync solution supports both room-based H.264 and Microsoft Lync-based RT media streams. This is important as the Avistar solution enables clients and partners to design a scalable and economical interoperability strategy between their conference room video solutions and their Microsoft Lync endpoints.

If you are at Citrix Synergy this week, I invite you to stop by our booth (#607) to see this breakthrough in videoconferencing for the Microsoft Lync platform.

Picking up Frost & Sullivan’s Award for Global New Product Innovation Award

Avistar’s mission has been to make it possible for businesses everywhere to deploy videoconferencing as an everyday business tool that can be used whenever and wherever employees choose.

Bob said the company had to reinvent itself – these days, the trendy word to refer to that is “pivot” by making its technology more componentized. Avistar sells its technology to companies that need to improve their room, unified communications, virtual desktop and cloud solutions. Avistar has gone from focusing on “the desktop” to focusing on the user experience and what it takes to make ubiquitous, scalable, reliable and economical personal videoconferencing a reality.

Avistar was recognized for its Avistar C3 Integrator™ solution, 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 videoconferencing application runs within the virtual desktop – that last point was cited by Frost & Sullivan as an important innovation in the desktop videoconferencing industry.

Frost & Sullivan has also recognized the Avistar C3 Conference™ solution for its ability to provide on-demand multiparty conferencing capabilities within virtualized and cloud solutions

For more information on the award, please see: http://www.avistar.com/resources/why-avistar/

All-Software Approach Is Essential in a BYOD Videoconferencing Environment – and a Call for Interoperability

Thanks to cool, easy-to-use technology like iPads, iPhones, and Android smartphones, the workplace is turning from a place where employees could use only IT department-approved technology to what’s been called BYOD – Bring Your Own Devices to work.

As we wrote in December, when we posted our top predictions for 2012, “employees today expect to use their own devices and have them sync with their corporate technology.” Or as Frost & Sullivan wrote last year, “The workforce of today is demanding mobility and flexibility, forever changing the face of enterprise communications. There are an estimated 1 billion mobile workers today and a large number of them are savvy users bringing their knowledge of consumer mobile technologies into the enterprise world and expecting to be armed with the right tools that make them more productive and connected.”

The challenge for IT departments is they must find solutions that can be used securely across different platforms including Windows, iOS, Mac, Android and Linux.

The challenge for companies trying to deliver solutions, especially when trying to unify multiparty videoconferencing requirements while meeting the demands of BYOD is that many providers still rely on hardware-based multipoint control unit servers (MCUs) – and hardware-based solutions are not well suited for an environment in which the platforms appear to constantly evolve and predeciting capacity and demand is downright difficult.

According to Aberdeen, one challenge in bridging consumer experience and corporate demands is that companies require more complex solutions that go beyond letting the kids chat with their grandparents. Companies need “realistic and reliable video with interactive capabilities that may include content sharing, unified messaging, integration with a unified communications suite” as well as multiple end-points and multiple devices using any number of platforms.

In that environment, with the need for real-time adaptively, hardware-based MCUs don’t make sense. Companies need the flexibility of an all-software approach. What’s more, an essential aspect to making videoconferencing work in a BYOD world is the ability to interoperate with the videoconferencing solution your customers and partners use.

Overall, the industry has not reached a point where interoperability occurs seamlessly and demand can be met on the fly. The Avistar C3 Conference solution changes all that by supporting interoperability and is flexible enough to scale on demand – in any direction. These are essential requirements for any company that is preparing to meet the demands of BYOD and videoconferencing, in a scalable and interoperable way.

Based on our experience, BYOD videoconferencing and device-agnostic videoconferencing doesn’t happen in a hardware world. BYOD videoconferencing happens in an all-software world, with all-software MCUs that can adjust on the fly, and software that can transcode across different devices seamlessly, quickly and economically.

Multiparty Videoconferencing Can Cost ¼ that of Traditional Solutions

We recently wrote about the deployment benefits of cloud-ready videoconferencing.

But another important benefit is that could-ready videoconferencing can be a cost-effective solution compared with traditional hardware-based solutions.

Because Avistar runs on standard off-the-shelf hardware and operating system software, and on virtualized servers, we can dramatically lower the cost of multiparty videoconferencing. Instead of expensive room systems – which were the only way most corporations deployed videoconferencing a decade ago – our all-software Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) brings down the cost so significantly that it makes videoconferencing much more justifiable and accessible to a broad range of organizations that previously wouldn’t look at videoconferencing because deploying a room system was expensive, complicated – and discouraged employees in the organization from actually leaving their desks to book the videoconferencing-enabled conference room.

In a recent benchmark study, the Avistar solution delivered 32-port HD multiparty videoconferencing for 1/4 the cost of competitive hardware-based MCU solutions.

Our solutions are not only significantly more cost-effective, they’re also much more flexible.  Enterprise IT groups can choose: establish your own cloud-based HD videoconferencing, or look to a cloud-based solutions provider. In either case, Avistar’s videoconference processing, price performance and cloud enablement allow you to deploy quickly and scale up smoothly. You can provide HD multiparty services to large user and customer bases at a fraction of what alternatives cost, and users have access from their preferred devices: tablets, PCs, smart phones, and room systems.

Sometimes looking at a new way to deal with an old problem can yield unrealized benefits. All-software based MCU’s are a great example of this. If you want to learn more about this approach, visit our conferencing page at:

http://www.avistar.com/the-all-software-mcu-avistar-c3-conference/