UC
While there were lots of interesting announcements at last week’s VoiceCon event, I found a great deal of attendee and vendor focus on interoperability, especially around video conferencing. Vendors including Cisco, Polycom, Tandberg, and Vidtel delivered announcements around their ability to interoperate with competitive or partner systems, and/or new options for cross-company video interoperability including Tandberg and Vidtel’s hosted bridging service. We continue to see interoperability as a major obstacle for those deploying UC, with 58% of companies telling us it’s the biggest single challenge they face. Judging by both the discussions in numerous sessions, and the slew of announcements, vendors get the message and are moving ahead with their efforts to slay the interoperability beast. Still, challenges remain including: Interoperability vs. Advancement: At the Tuesday morning session on H.264 SVC Tandberg and Polycom beat up on start-up Vidyo over lack of interoperability between Vidyo’s low-cost high-definition systems and their own products. Vidyo has been a pioneer in H.264 SVC support, enabling it to support higher frame rates at a lower cost with less need for strict network QoS. But SVC is still a new standard only partially defined by the ITU, meaning that any vendor who implements SVC (Radvision has another implementation) will face interoperability challenges. Meanwhile Polycom’s “High Profile” alternative to SVC claims to cut bandwidth consumption in half, but for now is a Polycom-only solution. Tandberg noted its plans center around H.265, an emerging protocol that may be another year or more away. We will continue to see the nip and tuck between moving forward and maintaining backwards compatibility that we have always seen. Standards That Aren’t Really Standards: SIP is a wonderful protocol enabling a extensible framework to support a variety of rich-media services in an IP friendly way. But SIP’s extensibility is also its downfall in that developers are free to add their own capabilities to their implementations. We continue to hear concerns, both in voice and video implementations, around SIP incompatibilities. While the SIP Forum promotes its SIPit interoperability events, the results aren’t publicly disclosed. We still lack a “SIP Certified” sticker that will help customers ensure that solutions from different vendors work together. Emerging Standards: Cisco made a splash with its Intercompany Media Engine, an appliance that mediates connections between different companies and features the ability to self-learn as calls are initiated. But while Cisco has submitted IME-related standard proposals to the IETF for consideration, IME remains a Cisco-only solution for now. Bottom line: Interoperability remains a challenge, and there will always be tradeoffs between interoperability and innovation. Ultimately its up to customers to press their vendors to work together, while they also understand interoperability’s limitations.
