The annual Collaboration Summit kicks off with video enhancements and a box that Cisco claims resolves the conflict between desktop virtualization and real-time performance.
COMPLETE COVERAGE
KERRAVALA: Cisco's Big Bet: The Democratization of Video
KERRAVALA: Cisco's Collaboration Summit Signals a Change in Mindset
McGEE-SMITH: Contact Centers at the Cisco Collaboration Summit
SLIDESHOW of today's announcements
Cisco's Collaboration Summit for its partners kicks off this week in Phoenix, and as it has in the past, this event will be the scene of some significant product announcements for UC and collaboration. Specifically, this year's primary focus is on video (not surprisingly), as well as desktop virtualization (a key topic and a conundrum from the perspective of realtime traffic performance). I got a pre-briefing on these products last Friday from David Hsieh, VP of marketing/emerging tech at Cisco.
In the first set of releases, Cisco announced a group of new products and service offerings aimed at furthering Cisco's drive to make video "the next voice," as CEO John Chambers has put it. Among the announcements:
* Products from Cisco's Tandberg acquisition will now integrate natively with Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
* A new "personal telepresence" release, the EX60, uses a 21.5-inch PC screen and attached camera, with an attached touchscreen for call control (i.e., dialing), with no other devices required. Cisco says this will be available by year-end; pricing wasn't released, though Cisco says it will be 30% lower than its EX90 Personal Telepresence.
* Personal Telepresence 500-32, a 32-inch-screen version of a unit previously released with a 37-inch screen. As with the previous unit, it's also intended to create a lower-cost option within its product line (again, 30% less). It's also due out by year-end.
* WebEx Meeting Center with High-Quality Video: This uses technology similar to Scalable Video Coding (SVC), but not SVC specifically, to optimize video quality in conferences using WebEx service. It can run the video full-screen in a WebEx conference and uses a switching technique that Cisco calls ActivePresence to automatically present the active speaker in the call as the dominant image, with a "filmstrip" of the other partipicants laid out beneath this main image.
* ActivePresence is also now available on all Telepresence endpoints, including the full-room, three-screen immersive version.
* Cisco Telepresence Exchange System, a service creation environment aimed at letting service providers roll out hosted telepresence services more easily.
To see pictures of the new Telepresence products, go to this slideshow.
The second major chunk of the announcement deals with desktop virtualization. As Irwin Lazar described in a recent blog, there's an inherent tension between desktop virtualization and real-time performance at the desktop: When a desktop is virtualized, the bulk of the processing is done remotely--a recipe for poor performance if an application, like voice or video, is expected to deliver real-time performance.
Cisco's solution to this problem is a box, called the Virtualized Experience Client (VXC) that the enterprise puts on every virtualized desktop where realtime application performance is required. If the desktop already has a Cisco 8900 or 9900 phone deployed to it, the enterprise adds a VXC 2100, which attaches to the back of the phone, as shown here:
If there's any other phone, or no phone, the enterprise deploys a standalone version, the VXC 2200, shown here:
As David Hsieh explained it to me, the VXC 2100 model essentially "borrows" the processing power of the 8900/9900 phone, as well as its Power over Ethernet, to provide the local processing horsepower for the real-time traffic, while the VXC 2200 draws PoE itself and provides its own processing; the setup essentially serves something analogous to a graphics accelerator, he said.
The overarching system for virtualized desktops with realtime communications is called the Cisco Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI). The VXI incorporates desktop virtualization software from Citrix (XenDesktop 5) and VMware (VMware View 4.5), integrated with Cisco's own Unified Communications applications. The VXI can run on Cisco's Cius tablet as well.
You have to applaud Cisco for being the first vendor to acknowledge and really try and tackle the conflict between desktop virtualization--which enterprises find highly appealing for cost and management reasons--and realtime communications. They're positioning VXI and especially VXC as having squared this particular circle, but I'm not sure it'll be an easy sell to enterprises.
The VXC 2100 just strikes me as kind of odd; it leverages a Cisco phone's processor, but if you have a phone on your desktop already, that's a big incentive not to worry about enabling a softphone on your desktop to begin with. And if your company's particular desire was to enable softphones on road warriors' laptops to save on roaming/LD charges, you're not going to ask them to schlep either their 8900/9900 phone + VXC 2100, or their standalone VXC 2200, along with them on the road.
This is surely more of a video-oriented play, especially given the first half of Cisco's announcement, and the company's general bias toward everything video. That would address the apparent incongruity of having an 8900/9900 yet still wanting to run realtime traffic on the PC. Cisco would make the case that everyone's a video user now, so their primary realtime communications device is going to be their computer anyway.
Still, whether for voice or video, the VXC strategy requires an enterprise to plunk one of these boxes down on every desktop that needs to run a virtualized desktop and still do realtime traffic. That's a lot of VXC boxes. It'll cut into whatever savings the enterprise was expecting to gain from going with virtualized desktops--by how much exactly, we don't know, since Cisco didn't include pricing for the VXC in its pre-briefings.
The VXC appliances are due for GA in March 2011.
