SuperOP 2011 Event & TIP

IMTC SuperOp! 2011, premier annual Interoperability Testing event, will take place in Kona, Hawaii, during the week of May 16-20.
During the event, IMTC members will get together to test various IP Video communications systems and technologies ranging from SIP and H.323 to VoLTE and IMS. During this event, Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) implementations will be tested for the first time ever.

Registration is open at http://www.regonline.com/superopkona

IMTC official announcement can be found here (PDF).

About the writer: IMTC

Polycom & TIP

A few days ago, Polycom announced support for the Cisco/IMTC - Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) standard.
The Telepresence Interoperability Protocol was developed by Cisco to allow multi-screen interoperability between Telepresence systems from different vendors. The protocol was transferred to IMTC for on-going development and is offered in a royalty-free license.

The announcement was promoted in PR channels of both Polycom and Cisco, a rather unique sight:


David Benham, IMTC TIP Activity Group Co-Chair responded to the announcement, indicating the importance of the protocol to the industry:
“We are pleased to hear that Polycom is joining other companies in adopting the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP), the only open, multi-screen interoperability protocol available today.   In mid 2010, Cisco transferred ownership of TIP to IMTC so it can provide stewardship of the protocol, offer TIP royalty-free to anyone as well as manage the TIP open source project.   We look forward to Polycom implementing TIP, which helps improve overall market acceptance of Telepresence systems and services.”

TIP support will allow Polycom Telepresence equipment to participate in a HD video-conference with Cisco products. Polycom UC Intelligent Core MCU will support Cisco’s TIP from Q2 2011.
Polycom isn’t the first Company outside Cisco to support TIP – The protocol is licensed by many companies including Radvision, LifeSize (Logitech) and Tandberg (now a part of Cisco).

For more info about TIP, check our TIP Page.

About the writer: IMTC

Weekly Industry News – TIP, Polycom, Skype, Facebook

Polycom announce support for TIP
Polycom Inc. announced future support for the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol:
IMTC TIP protocol was developed by Cisco to enable multiscreen interoperability with multi-vendor Telepresence systems. Polycom MCU – “UC Intelligent Core Platform” will support TIP from Q2 2011.
More about TIP in our special TIP Hub : http://blog.imtc.org/index.php/tip

Tip Webinar Recording
For those of you that missed the first Telepresence Interoperability Protocol Webinar, here is the full recording:


We thank David Benham from Cisco,  for the help with the editing and distribution.

Skype Easter-egg allows easy setup of multi-party calls
Skype hidden feature creates URL links for Multi-Party calls invitations – In order to create a URL link for a multi-party call, type “/” from the group chat window. The result will be a URL link directing to the call – for more details, check VoiceOnTheWeb Article.

Telstra CTO calls Femtocell ‘A Dumb Idea”
In Mobile World Congress 2011, Hugh Bradlaw talked about his views on Femtocells – “Femtocells — I usually classify these in the dumb-idea-of-the-week category.” He said that Femtocells are an ‘Admission of Defeat’ and that LTE isn’t the end of all capacity problems – QOS is.

Facebook on SIM?
While smartphones slowly becoming a norm for cellular phones, less capable devices are still the most common form – And while facebook have about 500million user-base, less than half of it has smartphones that enable web/application access to facebook.
Gemalto, the world largest SIM manafucture, announced the development of a SIM facebook client, that will support just about every type of sim-based mobile phone.
Interactions with Facebook (statuses, friend requests, etc.) will be sent as Class 2 SMS data. Read more about it at 3G4G Blog.

About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz

CTO Technology Session – Interoperability & UC Event

Register Here

IMTC has scheduled its first ever CTO Technology Session on March 8-9, 2011 at the AT&T Offices in Middletown, New Jersey. This is a forward looking session that will provide you will analyst information of the key technologies, markets and growth rates for UC, Video and Collaboration solutions. It is also intended, that the group will look at how all these technologies come together with a seamless, interoperable solution.

Historically IMTC has been at the center of communication industry technology changes as noted by our work with H.323, H.264, SIP Parity, IMS, T120, H.320 and PSS, 3G-324M, and other profiles for standard telephony protocols. Communications industry is changing rapidly, and IMTC is helping its members to embrace the change.

In addition to Keynote Speakers from AT&T, Cisco and Polycom, below is a list of confirmed speakers:

Confirmed Speakers:

  • Ronald Gruia, Principal Analyst ~ Frost & Sullivan
  • Phil Karcher, Principal Analyst ~ Forrester Research
  • Ginger Arnold, Manager, LMAC IT Infrastructure & Operations ~ Liberty Mutual
  • Russ Cary, Senior IT Manager ~ SAS Global Communications Services
  • Phil Edholm, VP Technology Strategy & Innovation ~ Avaya
  • Casey King, CTO ~ LifeSize  Communications

The IMTC is pleased to invite all IMTC member companies to this FREE event.  We’ll strive to provide you with information and answers to the following questions:

1. What is the current state of the communications industry?

2. What defines video communications today (Skype, Google, Apple, H.323 and SIP) and how it plays into Unified Communications?

3. How do these various video and unified communication solutions come together into a seamless cloud or enterprise implementation?

4. Where should your company spend its resources in order to solve our customers key pain points?

5. What are the key enterprise customer use cases?

6. Where do telepresence solutions fit?

7. What do I need to know about SVC? How does it impact the above?

8. What are the key dependencies impeding interoperability between equipment, network and cloud services?

9. What is the role of devices such as tablets and smart phones in the unified communication mix and specifically with video communications and how do they affect enterprise implementations?

Together with our member companies, the IMTC would like to build a roadmap of key industry technology initiatives to be addressed in order for the seamless communications cloud to work.

This IMTC event is closed to only IMTC member companies. You can send as many representatives from a member company as you like, however we encourage you to invite senior product management and CTO types of individuals.

Venue:

AT&T Offices
200 Laurel Avenue South
Middletown, New Jersey 07748

Closest Airport:

EWR (Newark)

Nearby Hotels:

http://www.research.att.com/evergreen/about_us/middletown_hotels.html

Register Here:
http://www.regonline.com/imtcctoroundtable

About the writer: IMTC

IMTC 2010, A year summary

It’s been a great year for IMTC and the Telecom Industry as a whole, some of our 2010 highlights Were:

* IMTC 2025 Global Virtual Conference was held in April 7th-8th using Radvision’s Scopia and lifestream platforms for broadcast. In the 2025 event we looked into the question – “How will your living room look like in the year 2025?” The two day event was a phenomenal success and attracted hundreds of viewers and many participants from major companies in the Telecom and Video conferencing fields (Cisco, Polycom, Radvision, NXP, PV and more). All the Videos from the 2025 event are available in our Youtube page and Here.

* SuperOP! 2010 - The annual industry flagship interoperability testing event, was highly successful and brought together more than 50 engineers from 14 companies from around the world. IMTC president Anatoli Levine wrote about it: “SuperConnect 2010, consisting of about 35 endpoints and servers, including a 3-screen telepresence system, took about 37 minutes from start to finish, with brilliant High Definition Video shining all over the room”.

* IMTC SIP Parity AG participated in SIPit27 Event – This year event was focused mainly on Video Interoperability, rather than voice. You can read the event summary Here.

* IMTC took ownership of the Telepresence Interoperability Protocol (TIP) protocol and established a new TIP Activity Group.  Read the TIP section for more details or send an email to TIP_info@imtc.org.

* IMTC First TIP Webinar was held at December 08. We had connectivity problems that prevented some of the speakers and registered users to participate – We apologize for that and will offer recordings of the event.
Additional TIP events are planned – further updates will be announced via our blog.

* IMTC Annual Meeting was held in November 3, 2010.  IMTC had a joint panel on the future of video with speakers from IMTC, UCIF and SIP Forum.

* IMTC President, Anatoli Levin Participated at AppTime Conference in LA, at the 4GWE/ITExpo event. Anatoli was also interviewed by Erin Monda for TMCNET 4GWE news.

* IMTC IMS AG leader and BoD member, Andrea Basso, participated at the 3G00/ETSI IMS November 2010 workshop on Implementation, Deployment and Testing.

We are looking forwards into 2011 events and activities – Stay Tuned!

About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz