Difference #1 in a long series

There was a recent public post by a member of Tandberg's team on one of the video conferencing forums. A lot of people that read my blog also below to some of the VTC forums out there...so you might have seen it.

While I respect their opinion and of course they are both entitled to have it and to express it, I certainly don't agree with it.

And I'll tell you why...

Building out a VTC solution is not based on one factor... MCU horsepower. While Codian did do one good thing for the industry... and yes, I'm giving them kudos right now... they forced the market place (TAA, Radvision, and Polycom) to look at their mcu designs and simplify how mcu capacity is calculated. I'll agree.. the Polycom MGC was difficult to calculate how many people you could connect to it. Thank you Codian. You made us all sit up, take notice, and fix an issue we had.

But..we now have all moved on.. but Codian (now part of Tandberg) beats the same drum over and over. Guys, you are now hurting the industry and hurting customers. Instead of us focusing on customer problems and delivery solutions... we have to spend time talking about ports. And, for those that read the post they made, we actually are able to find lots of faults with your MCU. But...before I get into that... I will not dispute you have a "port is a port" design and I won't disput you built a mcu that has horsepower.

But...what I will dispute is that you have any depth of features to take VTC to the next level. Seeing that you haven't stopped to listen to customers deeper needs, you've missed the boat. Lets start to review those features. I'll try to post one as often as I can when I'm not stuck in a plane.

The first feature is Auto-Cascade. Auto-Cascade is a wonderful feature pioneered by Polycom for customers with geographically dispersed MCUs. Lets go through an example. A customer puts a MCU in NYC, London, and Mumbai. With auto-cascade turned on, if an end user wants to start up an ad-hoc call, all they have to do is inform the participants (email, IM, calendar, etc) to dial into their meeting room, lets say its 5678. Instead of having to call a central bridge, they call their local bridge, enter in meeting room id 5678. The system will automatically figure out that there is say 2 callers in meeting room 5678, one on the London bridge, and two on the Mumbai bridge. The system will cascade the bridges together. No scheduling is needed. No pre-definitions are needed. The cascade link is built automatically based on people being in the same meeting room. This feature makes the end user experience very easy...and it saves tremendously on network costs.

We even have the ability to define how the cascade is made (ip or isdn) and can even define primary vs. backup.

Far as I can tell, best Codian can do is have to manually setup the cascade for every call.