And so another busy week became a history. IMTC SuperOp!, annual industry flagship interoperability testing event, brought together more than 50 engineers from 14 companies from around the world in a small town of Jesi in Italy, to continue enhancing interoperability of multimedia communications products.

Of course you can not drive forward by constantly looking into a rearview mirror. Not looking in to that mirror at all is also dangerous ( especially for those who likes to drive fast ).
Reflecting on the past, it is easy to see how much the level of interoperability improved and evolved. Decade ago, an hour long testing time slot was spent on properly registering with the server, and then may be making one successful simple call (or not). Video did look decent on a small screen ( with huge piece of hardware behind it to make it work).
The term “HD Video” was not even coined yes. And the term “telepresence” was unheard of, at least in the practical terms. SuperConnect, a culmination point of a week-long testing, which was connecting all devices passed the preliminary testing, would take more than half a day to achieve.

Fast forward 10 years. To cut the chase as anyone in the industry can figure out the particulars, the 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.

Can we now gleefully rest on laurels and declare “mission accomplished”? You guessed it right, the simple two letter answer is “no”. Video communication is only starting to become personal and getting into homes. Mobile video communication is still largely non-existent, and both personal and mobile communication being extremely clustered (read: uninteroperable) as the very least. We are starting (only now) to define telepresence standards which will later on lead to the interoperable implementations. The work just started in various IMTC Activity Groups on other important communication technologies, such as VoLTE and Live Streaming over HTTP. All in all, there is a lot of exciting work ahead of us on making the world better connected (and, therefore, smaller) place – so come on over and will see you all next year at IMTC SuperOp! 2011!