“Skype is in our future” – Video Conferencing at Pfizer

In March 2011, IMTC has conducted the first CTO roundtable – a first of it’s kind event with participants from both the vendor, the service provider and the clients end. Mirril McMullen, the director of connectivity solutions architecture at Pfizer Pharmaceuticals has joined the event to talk about video-conferencing in Pfizer. For the first time we bring you the full transcribe of his talk, alongside video – this is a must see for anyone looking to understand the customer perceptive of companies with multi-vendor equipment:

 

  • The problem with combining legacy SD endpoints with newer HD ones.
  • Unused conferencing rooms and scheduling.
  • The importance of desktop video-conferencing and SAAS.
  • Interoperability problems.
  • The importance of Outlook to scheduling calls.
  • Why Skype is the future of corporate video-conferencing.

To download the presentation, video and full-transcribe please leave your details below and an email will be sent with all the download links:

 

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About the writer: IMTC

Industry News Summary: CES 2012 & Thoughts

In the last few days I was hooked to the CES 2012 stream to see what would be the coolest products of 2012. It seems that in most categories the coolest products of 2012 would be those of 2011, maybe with a better screen. While this is disappointing to some, I believe that there is a value of small gradual improvements - Tablets just now become more and more useful as a productivity device, we would probably see lots of innovation from the software side in the next few months. But even if CES was rather sleepy this year, some products worth mentioning and also in an enterprise perspective. My list is shorter than Anatoli’s, but I think it’s similar in nature:

 

  • Transparent LCDs – Samsung’s transparent ’smart-window’ concept showed us that transparent LCDs can be used not only in shopping mall installations, but also in homes and office environments. Telepresence Options already see it as a potential technology for telepresence installations, among many other things.
  • Smarts TVs are nothing new, but as we see products like the ‘Ubuntu TV‘ and the Android 4.0 powered TVs – it’s only a matter of time before TVs will be the place where most people ‘Skype’ in, and maybe later – companies video-conferencing with. Future TVs might also include depth sensors, and those, beside offering gesture based interface might also help enhance video conferencing experience, as showed in the Kinect Conferencing demo.
  • Telepresence Robots – when I first mentioned telepresence robots in the IMTC Blog I talked about them as specialized medical product, that might find their ways into the enterprise world. Well, that’s not really an ‘IF’ question anymore – LTE enabled Vgo robots were showed in CES 2012, and the technology is already being used for remote workers and management.

To me, those were the real highlights of CES (well, unless 4k video is your thing, but we sure need a lot of bandwidth for that).

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About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz

Mobile Video Series – Radvision Scopia Mobile V3

Back in May, I was arguing about the true meaning of Telepresence. An analyst named Rob Bamforth from Quocirca wrote an article saying that the true meaning of Telepresence isn’t big screens and costly systems – it’s the illusion of being there – and for that he argued that low-lantancy is enough. I for the other hand, thought that low-lantency is only a part of the picture, and that for total immersion one must need eyesight level cameras and all the technical mumbo-jumbo.



Room Systems – anything less isn’t ‘Telepresence’?

But putting aside the exact semantics regarding the *videoconferencing* term called Telepresence, let’s talk about the general concept of tele-presence:
Lets say for a second that I own a business that relays heavily on out-of-office workers – and from all I concern, those workers are just as available in terms of communications, as people that work inside the office – isn’t that telepresence? Isn’t that the notion of having those people ‘here with me’?

From a business, and practical point of view – that is telepresence.


Cisco’s Cius – good for remote workers, but not as widespread as an iPhone

A few years ago, achieving that goal was costly and sometimes impossible. It is mainly because of the work of vendors such as RADVISION and Vidyo that this situation has changed. Scalable Video Coding is the key behind recent developments in both low-cost HD video systems and mobile video conferencing. This relatively new technology allows for high quality video communication over the unmanaged connections, such as the Internet. If the codec couldn’t have the ability to adapt to unstable bandwidth it would be impossible to connect remote workers reliably to a conference call. But now with SVC and broadband – it’s possible. These days, EVERYONE has smartphones that are capable of video communication – so wouldn’t it just make sense to turn them into a small video-conferencing device?One of the first companies to introduce a mobile client for it’s video-conferencing platform was RADVISION. When they released the first version the mobile client, it only had the ability to manage the video conference, not to be a part of it as a video client – effectively making an iPad a neat remote control pad. Today both iPhones and iPads has cameras and the latest version of Scopia Mobile is a fully functioning one – at last, the ability to connect to a conference call when on the go.


RADVISION’s Scopia Mobile – high-quality videoconferencing for iDevices

Just like the desktop client, Scopia mobile support video-conference with multiple participants (up to 28) and data sharing via h.329 (which is super important for out-of-office workers). But what’s really special about it that it just work well. IMTC is using Scopia internally for meetings and webinars, and in the latest meeting, the VP marketing of IMTC – Kfir Pravda, had to call in while driving, from his iPhone, over a 3G connection. That was a conference call with multiple people around the world, Kfir himself was in Israel!


3G-enabled conference with an iPhone – Amazing!

The call just worked. This is in my view, amazing, knowing how difficult it is to get a decent video-call quality from a 2-way call in a non-commercial system such as Skype (at least here, in Israel). In terms of features, again – that’s a fully functioning Scopia – and on the iPad2 it supports full 720P video.

I think that mobile video clients will create a revolution in video-conferencing, the form-factor is there (tablets), the technology is there (H.264) and the out-of-office situation will probably grew larger and require businesses to adapt accordingly.
Maybe Rob was right and the true meaning of Telepresence is just mobile video-conferencing that actually works.

Here on the IMTC blog we plan to compare a few mobile solutions over the next months, Scopia included. So stay tuned.

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About the writer: IMTC

Industry News Summary – Intel, HSPA, Telemedicine and more

IMTC Newest Member – Intel Corporation
IMTC Welcomes Intel as it’s newest member! Among recently added members are also Siemens Enterprise Communications GmbH & Co. KG. and LG. [Read more...]

About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz

Industry News Summary – Telepresence Robots, LTE and Spectrum

Telepresence Robots to take over video-conferencing market?
Apparently, Telepresence robots (which I already mentioned in my “Telepresence How Does It Work?” post) gain momentum as a valid representation of remote workers: [Read more...]

About the writer: Itzhak Wolkowicz