READING (Done on Cisco Spotlights Video At Its Partner Summit)

It’s said that Cisco Systems is prepping its channel partners to help it drive its next big growth market: video. Executives spent much of this month’s Cisco Partner Summit evangelizing video and the huge role it will play in the vendor’s technology and channel strategies going forward.
Cisco President and CEO John Chambers said the networking giant in the coming year will focus on improving collaboration by weaving video into enterprise voice, e-mail and instant-messaging applications, as part of the company’s push toward unified communications.

“The majority of interaction between people is going to be video, and partners are going to be the ones driving profitability in this area,” Chambers said during a keynote at the conference in San Diego. Chambers outlined a future in which the ability for workers to communicate and make decisions in groups will speed business processes and spur the development of new apps, such as video collaboration.

“The ability to implement loose forms of collaboration, regardless of where people are located, gives you the ability to move as a group and make decisions faster than you could before,” he said. At the foundation of Cisco’s strategy is its recently revamped Unified Communications IP telephony lineup. Unveiled earlier this month, it includes native support for SIP, adding presence capabilities, improved mobility features and the ability to support third-party SIP-based phones. Chambers demonstrated communications capabilities that will enable customers to use drag-and-drop features to add video to phone calls create ad hoc conference calls and collaborate on documents.

Tim Hebert, COO of Atrion Networking, Warwick, R.I., said Cisco’s plans to pump up video capabilities play directly into the VAR’s strategy to build up a practice around communications applications that provide customers with process efficiency and productivity gains. “We’re past customers talking about IP telephony as dial-tone. It’s about changing the way you do business,” he said.

Jim Teter, COO of Calence, a VAR in Tempe, Ariz., said video is going to be a critical technology piece in converged communications solutions for customers of all sizes.
“The technology is now affordable enough for a lot of small businesses to take advantage of it,” he said.

Technology partners also will play a key role in keeping Cisco’s innovation engine running, Chambers said. “Partnering is much harder than acquiring as a way to move forward, but innovation always is a combination of doing it yourself or with a team.
And the courage to partner is also important.”

LINK TO SOURCE: - http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=SGECZCNOSTQXCQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=173600656
http://www.lifesize.com/press/in_the_news/news_081406.php

READING
(VENDOR TOUTS LINEUP'S SCALABILITY) Radvision Preps For High-Def With Scopia

Radvision last month launched Scopia, a new line of multimedia conferencing infrastructure products that support high-definition videoconferencing and high-fidelity audio conferencing.
The new family of Multipoint Control Units (MCUs) and gateways debuts as part of Radvision’s strategy to support the convergence of IP voice, video, Web collaboration and presence, said Killko Caballero, general manager of the enterprise business unit at Radvision, Fair Lawn, N.J.

“Videoconferencing is no longer a stand-alone application,” Caballero said. Radvision also launched iView, its new monitoring and management application suite, which provides a centralized view of all video endpoints and network devices.
IView enables Web-based scheduling that makes videoconferencing easer to use, he said.
Radvision teamed with LifeSize at the Infocomm conference last week in Orlando, Fla., to demonstrate interoperability between Scopia and LifeSize’s high-def videoconferencing products.

“While the [high-def videoconferencing space] is still very much a nascent market, the platform we have today allows our customers to move toward it,” Caballero said.
The Scopia platform supports conferences of up to 2 Mbits per second, with capacity for 12 to 384 video ports or up to 1,728 audio ports on a single chassis.

The product line’s scalability helps set it apart, said Christopher Platt, director of business development at ReView Video, a conferencing solution provider and distributor in Aurora, Ill.
With previous products, the conferencing experience degrades as more users join and share the available resources, Platt said. “Products Radvision has had in the past, as well as those from other manufacturers, did not scale equally,” he said.

“Now, the new platform is a flat solution from the standpoint that everybody that connects has the same resources as everybody else,” Platt said.
The Scopia family comes in three versions: the 100 for small deployments; the 400, which supports up to four MCU blades for large deployments; and the 1000, a high-capacity, carrier-class version.

The 100 series includes a stand-alone gateway to connect IP videoconferencing with ISDN endpoints and networks, as well as an all-in-one model that includes gateway and MCU functionality. MCUs provide media processing, handling the video and any required changes to resolution and bandwidth needed to ensure quality.

LINK TO SOURCE: - http://www.crn.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=02DSICCRFDOISQSNDLRSKH0CJUNN2JVN?articleID=188702559

READING (Done on LifeSize A Leading Member in Video Conferencing)

Its said that Videoconferencing has never taken off in the industry, mostly because of the quality. A creative only has to see his beautiful roughcut butchered over a stuttering video link to walk away from the technology forever. Had the opportunity to finally take a live look at the LifeSize high definition videoconferencing system. In short, the system delivers a 16:9 widescreen 1280x720 pixel image (720p in broadcast parlance) at 30 frames per second with very little artifacts.

By comparison, traditional video conferencing uses CIF resolution which is 352x240. Thanks to Videré, a specialist on video conferencing systems based in Quincy, MA, was able to see it side by side with a traditional videoconferencing rig, and there is no comparison...
The components powering this system are sleek and well designed:
A remote controlled camera more than a little reminiscent of the sleek Apple iSight camera, a slim desktop audioconferencing device, a small tuck-away electronics package.

The system functions as you would expect, a slim remote gives you access to onscreen menus that you use to make calls as well as control the system. The camera has an exceptionally wide field of vision at 70 degrees to produce the widescreen aspect ratio of the image. Videré set up two IP calls, one from a Tandberg system and one from the Lifesize system at the same data rate, 512kbs and the difference was dramatic, not just in the absence of stairstepping, color blooms and other static artifacts, but also in the fluidity of motion, color saturation and general naturalness of the Lifesize image.

There is of course a price to pay for this. The system is slightly more expensive than a Polycomm system for example, though of course, you are getting a High Definition product versus a product that Polycomm will probably end of life soon to move to HD. There are no current universal HD standards so you will only get HD if you are talking to another Lifesize system. You can connect to non-HD systems over IP using h.323 standard but if you want to use dialup you will need an IP to public switched network bridge.

The system consumes a lot of bandwidth delivering full HD at 1.2 megabits more bandwidth than all but the most robust private networks can deliver with Quality of Service protection. You could chance the connection over the Internet, but doubt it would work consistently unless both ends are supplied by the same carrier. The bottom line though is that this is the first system that has a potential for becoming a tru working tool for creative markets.

You can hook up video sources as well as computers output to it and get full motion realtime video like you have never seen before on a videoconference link. Ideally, you would provide both ends of the call, either office to office or office to client as well as the network connectivity that it requires. Pair that with a well designed room with proper lighting and careful training of the staff to manage the systems, and we could come closer to finally being able to substitute much client travel with videoconferencing.
If you are considering video conferencing, Lifesize is a must see.

LINK TO SOURCE: - http://www.lifesize.com/press/in_the_news/news_051106.php