IMTC: Interoperability, Multimedia and Standards
IMTC president Anatoli Levine was interviewed for TMCnet website.
In his interview Anatoli talked about his predictions in the fields of video communication, 4G networks and mobile platforms.
Click here to read the Interview [TMCnet]
Anatoli Levine is the senior director of product management at Radvision and IMTC President. With more than 20 years of professional experience in management, communication technologies and software engineering. Anatoli has been closely involved with IMTC activities, where he chaired a number of technical Activity Groups and served on the board of directors for 4 years.
By Kfir Pravda
A panel discussion from Spring VON 2007 in San Jose, California, exploring the question of the advantages of open standards vs. proprietary software in the world of VoIP deployments. With the runaway success of Skype, members of IMTC and one brave Skype employee ask, why bother with standards?
Moderator: Anatoli Levine – Sr. Director, Software Support and Services, RADVISION
Jonathan Christensen – Sr. Director, Skype
Håkon Dahle – Chief Technologist, TANDBERG
Kfir Pravda – President, Pravda Marketing Services
Peter Saint-Andre – Director of Standards, Jabber Inc.
Shantanu Sarkar – Sr. Manager, Cisco Systems
Chris Steck – Director of Technology Strategy, RealNetworks
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When you are at such an exciting technology conference as VON is, of course the desire is to see and hear every talk – and of course, it doesn’t work like this, especially considering RADVISION booth duties and IMTC promotion and networking. But I was very happy that I managed to attend Zohar Zisapel talk about video. Zohar is RADVISION Chairman of the Board, and a Video over IP industry veteran.
I really liked what I heard, probably because it resonated so much with my own perspective on the real-time Video. Just to reflect back, I had startling moment at IMTC Fall Forum 2001 in Seattle, where Rich Baker, one of the PictureTel founders, said the following: “in the enterprise, Video is not mission-critical application, and voice and e-mail are”. This was something I never realized before, and from that moment on, I kept repeating that sentiment almost as a mantra.
Enterprises don’t have compelling reason to put video on every desktop… until video becomes personal. Until people will be able to use video to connect to their families and friends, there will be no driving force behind video on every desktop. And this is what Zohar was talking about and vividly demonstrating with a number of excellent video clips. The ubiquitous video connectivity is becoming part of our daily life (well, not necessarily in US, yet).
With advent of 3G mobile telephony the ability to see your kids at any time, and to witness remote events, and to conduct business meetings from the beach is simply priceless. And as Zohar pointed out, video does worth a thousand words, as he clearly demonstrated with last clip in his presentation, showing a number of short silent video fragments, which were delivering very powerful emotions.
And then there was only one question coming from the audience (and that was the question I was expecting to hear) – when 3G will come to US. Well, nobody was able to answer that question, but with all the new phones, supporting Wi-Fi, 3G and EVDO, my hopes are really high that even US will come out from the stone cellular age. Now, we just need to ensure all those technologies are interoperable…
I’m very excited to be the first to welcome you to the IMTC Blog! As a popular saying goes, it is hard to teach old dogs the new tricks. IMTC is 14 years old, so in the terms of age technology, it is quite an honorable age. A lot of young engineers today might even question the sheer existence of the standards IMTC was all about. However, IMTC as an organization is evolving, and we do “learn new tricks” and reinvent ourselves. We moved from H.320 to H.323, then to Packet Switched, SIP and 3G Mobile Video. We continue evolving further to IMS and Content Delivery.
IMTC managed to build an incredibly valuable collection of standardization-related documents for such technologies like JPEG (we call this collection a Historical Archive). While organization evolved, the core things IMTC is all about stayed the same – standards, interoperability and expertise.
IMTC always advocated multimedia communications technologies based on open standards. The focus of the IMTC work is Real Life Interoperability. With numerous Interoperability testing events, including the flagship annual SuperOp! event, IMTC is well known in the industry as leading authority on interoperability testing. And with IMTC Forums, we always bring together world experts in multimedia communications and standards development. And this combination of expertise and leadership makes me believe in exciting future prospects of IMTC.
I do like science fiction a lot. While driving today to work, I was thinking about predictions made in the books about the ways we will communicate. And one thing did strike me is that almost everything which was dreamed of, except may be “Beam me up, Scotty”, is the reality today. We can see and hear each other any time any place, we always know our exact location, our cars can park themselves…if you are a science fiction writer, what kind of communication technologies will you envision? Well, I’m sure, whatever we will come up with, IMTC will be around to make sure it is interoperable and to promote it.
And while the new technologies are being invented, IMTC is continuing on its current way, and inviting you to join in. Next week at VON in San Jose, IMTC puts together a panel of experts who will discuss the role of standards in the today’s communications world. More info is available here: http://www.von.com/schedule_gcs31168946047.html
Then in April, IMTC members will get together for annual SuperOp! 2007 event ( April 23-27, in Jesi, Italy), to test all the latest developments in SIP, IMS, 3G-324M, Packet Switched and other technologies. And of course we have more events planned throughout 2007 and beyond. Bottom line is very simple – if your company is not a member of IMTC yet, make it high priority to join IMTC and help shaping the future of multimedia communications!
Have a great interoperable communications day!
