Cisco

Just some quick thoughts...

but first, I should tel you about my job here. I'm Director of Business Development, and I focus on improving how we do business with our Infrastructure products. All that backend gear that makes a video network work. So...I get hit up constantly by lots of people at Polycom, our resellers, and our customers. Most of the time, its competitive in nature.

Today, I got a call from a sales rep in the midwest and he was trying to close some business at a customer. Only issue is that customer is a subsidiary of a larger company. John Chambers, god bless him in all the free advertising he does for us, had given away a bunch of their TP3000s to the parent company. So...that meant the subsidiary was going to have to have combatability with the Cisco gear.

Here's what Cisco told the customer when they found out they were looking at PLCM for a mcu. "Mr. customer, Polycom's solutions are not using the STANDARD SIP protocol for either their MCUs or endpoints". Which..this is quite funny. While true that Cisco uses SIP for their telepresence solution...and not true that we don't support SIP... but the real funny is that Cisco implementation uses custom extensions...so it essentially is proprietary. A data sheet standard..not a implemented standard.

So, it was quite fun rolling out to the customer that the Cisco solution entails the TP3000s, a Callmanager, a Cisco Teleprescence Switch, and a Cisco 3545 MCU. All that because Cisco is proprietary. See... their interoperable solution requires that the TP3000 bridge the call through a CTS which then cascades to the 3545 MCU which can then ip gateway call out to a standards based endpoint (EP). The cascade link is H.264, 768k CIF video and G.711 audio. Good motion handling...but poor resolution and poor audio quality. Cisco can't interop with standards based 720P or G.722.1c.

I wonder how easy it is to make that call?

Oh...don't forget...the CTS is a 36 port HD bridge... the cascade takes ups one of those ports. So...for every conference with non-Cisco video, you'll need to burn a port on the CTS. And... 36 ports is not much. Considering the fact that a TP3000 uses up 3 ports.. it essentially is really a 12 port bridge. LOL.

Nice design Cisco. ;-)