Cisco. Polycom. LifeSize. Vidyo. Radvision. Magor. When it comes to developers of video conferencing solutions for use in business settings, these are some of the names that immediately spring to my mind. HP, as well, with the telepresence solution formerly called Halo.
Developers of business communications solutions (or business-grade telephony platforms, or software-based real-time voice systems, or whatever other convoluted euphemism you might choose to invoke to avoid saying PBX) without video conferencing products of their own tend to partner with one or more of these to add room-based video conferencing solutions to their portfolio.
But – without developing a comprehensive set of Polycom-like video conferencing systems of their own – some business communications solution (PBX) developers are beginning to get quite creative in the video conferencing options they are introducing. Avaya has its Desktop Video Device and related Flare interface. Aastra has ViPR and more recently the BluStar desktop device, which can facilitate multipoint video conferences without need of an MCU. Cisco, of course, has Cius and a full line of desktop, room-based and immersive telepresence solutions.
And Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise group is talking more about video conferencing than it has in the past. Like Avaya and Siemens Enterprise, Alcatel-Lucent has a line of room-based video conferencing systems from a third-party partner (LifeSize). And like Aastra, Avaya and Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent has a new telephone/desktop video end point (My IC Phone). This has been written about a bit, so I'm going to leave it at that because I want to move on to OpenTouch. OpenTouch is on the one hand the name for Alcatel-Lucent’s new product architecture and on the other hand a new suite of products based on the architecture.
One of the features the OpenTouch architecture will deliver is "video switching," which lets users see the active speaker in multipoint video calls set up via OpenTouch. In a 2012 update to products within the OpenTouch architecture, video conferencing participants will get full continuous presence, where users can see multiple video conference participants. And with first version of OpenTouch, a Radvision MCU will still be needed to join more than two conference participants. Whereas with the 2012 update that requirement will go away since the OpenTouch software will provide the functionality that would otherwise be done by an MCU.
An Alcatel-Lucent Immersive Communications video conference. Each of the individuals are in different locations, with the Immersive Communications software taking "cut-outs" of them and transposing them into a single virtual conference room.
Alcatel-Lucent's other foray into video conferencing comes in the form of what it calls its Immersive Communications solution. I mentioned this in passing a while back, providing a link to a marketing video that shows some of the proposed capabilities of the solution that is supposed to ship in early 2012. I recently caught up with Dr. Thomas Kallistenius (is anyone else besides me intimidated by businessmen and women with Dr. as their salutation?), marketing director for Immersive Communications, and it seems the above mentioned marketing video is a bit out of date. Alcatel-Lucent developers have removed the gestural control functionality, which was a clear differentiator but created a rather foreign feeling UI. And the augmented reality capabilities have been toned down quite a bit. Rather than placing cut-outs of video conferencing participants into one of any number of customizable virtual environments, the Immersive Communications solution is expected to use a conference room metaphor that is more familiar to business users.
Though the Immersive Communications solution is not yet ready to be publicly demoed (that will likely take place in the fall), Alcatel-Lucent has a new marketing video that does a really good job of showing what the Immersive Communications experience will be like. This is being shown to customers and partners at the Dynamic Enterprise Tour events, but is not yet posted online. Hopefully someone will stick it on Youtube before long. Until then there's some more info on the Immersive Communications solution on this newly launched site.
Other details on Alcatel-Lucent's Immersive Communications solution as it stands now:
* "Background extraction" technology from Bell Labs cuts out each participant’s image, from the top of the head to upper torso. All background images--my drab office wall, the potted plants in my living room--cannot be seen by other conference participants.
* There's no technical limit to the number of conference participants, but eight or ten is considered the practical limit. More cut-outs than that, and the UI gets overly crowded and distracting.
* No special end points are required. Any PC-, laptop- or tablet-attached camera will suffice. (But apparently not cameras on smart phones, even though tablets using 3G or LTE are supported.)
* Audio and visual cues from conference participants can give them more or less prominence. Raising my hand or my voice can push my image in front of others, whereas if multiple people talk simultaneously no one participant's image will be more prominent than the others.
* Web collaboration software will provide presentation sharing, document collaboration and similar features.
* No investments in OpenTouch products are required. Immersive Communications will be offered as a cloud-based service, with the underlying technology hosted either in an ALU data center (with channel partners selling the service) or in a service provider's data center (with the carrier selling the service). Or both. The go-to-market strategy, like the solution itself, remains in development.
