Tandberg beefs up MCU offering

Holy MCU, Batman! Tandberg definitely has its sights on Polycom with the news coming out of InfoComm this week. First the company announced its new Media Processing System (MPS) MCU with 48 ports of 384K bit/sec video plus 48 more ports for audio-only connections. The chassis of the MCU has room for more boards, so expansion will be coming down the road. In addition to the 96 users, MPS supports H.264 encoding and 128-bit AES encryption. They’ve also made just about everything hot-swappable, so if one board fail (or even one power supply) conferences can still continue.

Second, the company announced version 9.0 of the Tandberg Management System (TMS) that’s used to manage endpoints and video network components within an enterprise. Version 9.0 features Microsoft Live Communication Server integration, support for the H.350 standard that allows user information to be stored in and retrieved from central LDAP directories, and integration with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. The cool part about the new directory stuff is that endpoints can now do dynamic searches against the central database for names and numbers. In version 8.0, local copies of the directory were pushed out to systems once a day, so updates could take 24 hours to replicate. Now they’re instantaneous.

Part of that dynamic search capability is in the third piece of Tandberg’s news: A new software upgrade (version E4) for Tandberg endpoints. In addition to directory features, the new release adds DuoVideo (video + data content) support for those with a single monitor. The picture can be split to show both the person speaking and an accompanying slide or application share. Plus, Tandberg’s upped the security capabilities in the new endpoint software.

All three will be available July 12. MPS will have a starting price of $146,000 (obviously targeted at service providers and large enterprises.) TMS 9.0 is priced per managed endpoint with a 10-system pack going for $1,500. The endpoint upgrade will be free to those with a service contract.