Avistar Revolutionizes Unified Communications "Quality of Experience"

On September 16, Avistar announced a partnership to its provide bandwidth management technology for IBM unified communication and collaboration solutions. I recently had the wonderful opportunity of speaking with Avistar's CEO Simon Moss, and CMO Stephen Epstein about their company's exciting new advances into the unified communications "quality of experience" field.

The unfortunate reality of the UC (unified communications) and convergence fields is that many users are simply "turned off" to the new technologies being deployed due to poor quality of experience. Avistar's Stephen Epstein described the large number of potential bottlenecks in modern IP-based unified communications systems. From the endpoints, to the local network, wide-area network, and all of the devices in between, there's significant potential for packet loss, delay, and other common IP-related problems. While other applications can sustain such network inconsistencies, videoconferencing cannot. This is where Avistar's technology really shines.

Since the beginning of proprietary videoconferencing nearly 15-20 years ago, Avistar has provided quality-assurance technologies to improve and enhance the end user experience. Since most of the proprietary videoconferencing hardware has been ported to more 'open' software platforms, Avistar has adapted their technologies towards the new environment.

Avistar's technology utilizes dynamic monitoring of the end-to-end environment to provide a better end user experience. This can include many factors, including:

- IP network quality (packet loss, delay, etc)
- Endpoint performance (memory, video performance, etc)

Using a dynamic algorithm, Avistar's software reacts to deficiencies or problems in the network or the endpoints, and modifies frame rates or other variables. The use of "class of user" environments can be implemented as well to provide different levels of QoE to several sets of users.

Avistar's C3 platform utilizes special dynamic network and bandwidth management technology to achieve significantly better end user experience without additional network capacity. With the new partnership with IBM, Avistar is integrating their proven technologies into multiple platforms so that more users across more platforms can utilize this important technology.

I asked Simon Moss and Stephen Epstein from Avistar about the specifics of the IBM integration deal. Specifically, I wanted to know how Avistar planned to integrate their technologies into IBM's existing UC suite. Avistar and IBM are working to merge their products and technology suites to IBM's standards, including the integration, QA, and packaging processes.

This type of cutting edge technology is very promising in the convergence and UC markets. Avistar aims to significantly enhance the QoE (Quality of Experience) for end users, and to do so transparently to the user. With the new integration deal with IBM in place, Avistar is on the fast-track to changing the landscape of UC quality as we know it.

For more information on Avistar's partnership with IBM, view the press release.