Never in our 15-year corporate history has Avistar seen so much opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
Usually a company blog will offer commentary relevant to new products, industry events, marketing initiatives, etc. But this time we decided to try something a little different. An offer was made for anyone to author a blog, so I decided to see if people would be interested in hearing some technical details about some of the more interesting challenges we have faced getting our current products ready.
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.
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.