Microsoft Spotlights Comm Partnerships At VoiceCon

(This story originally appeared on NetworkComputing.)

Microsoft is certainly gaining a number of important partnerships around their Office Communication Server with integration and partnership announcements from Audiocodes, Aastra, HP, Polycom and Verizon. Taken individually, none of these announcements is earth-shattering, but taken together it shows there is momentum growing behind OCS and also highlights the growing tension between open standards and practical interoperability.Here are details on each of these announcements:

That momentum is good for Microsoft and Microsoft's customers, but it also furthers the UC markets continuation of approved equipment lists and reduced vendor selection.  In conversations with vendors, a common theme is using open standards, and in some cases, frustration that enterprise customers perceive VoIP, video and UC as proprietary, or at the very least, closed.

Darren Podrabsky, Marketing Manager for HP's Halo, HP's immersive telepresence product and service suite, reiterated HP's line that they are dedicated to supporting and using open standards. Podrabsky also said that he has to spend time getting enterprise IT to understand that UC, at least HP's implementation of UC, is built on open standards.

Is it any wonder that enterprise IT believes that UC products are proprietary and don't interoperate? They don't. At least not well. If you want a UC system, then you buy from your vendors, VAR or system integrators approved-equipment list. If you go off the menu, you don't get support. Whether or not the system is proprietary or not doesn't matter, it might as well be.

An attendee from a services reseller was lamenting this very fact after a session on video-conferencing. "My CIO is getting pressure to use video-conferencing to reach out to new and existing customers. He's is being told by vendors that they use open standards, and I have to be the guy that says no, that won't work the way you want."

Interoperability is a problem that all the vendors and VARs at Voicecon acknowledge, and we have received assurances that it is coming around the corner. If you are going to purchase a UC system today, make sure you select one that has the broadest set of partnerships.

In most cases, the only thing moving is a person's head or face, so the changes are relatively small, needing only 1.5 Mbps on average to update the far end. More movement requires larger updates and more bandwidth. On a LAN, 1.5 Mbps on average isn't too bad, unless you have a lot of HD conferences going on, but over a WAN, HD conferences can gobble up bandwidth fairly quickly. Most HD conferencing systems are using H.264 Baseline or Main profiles, which define the frames per second and video resolution, the combination of which partially determines the required bandwidth needed for each stream.

Polycom recently announced support for H.264 High Profile, which more aggressively compresses the video stream, and Polycom claims they can transmit 720P video at 512 Kbps or half of other 720P HD video products. Polycom also plans to support scalable video coding, pushing bandwidth requirements lower while making video delivery in a changing network more robust.

Both Tandberg and Polycom partner with major UC vendors like Avaya, Cisco and Microsoft, as well as integrators like HP, to provide a seamless video component to a larger communications product offering. Through integration with Active Directory and Exchange, video devices can be discovered like any other network resource and can tightly integrate with the UC scheduling and management system. While the prices for high end video-conferencing are still high, they will drop as adoption increases.