Difference #2

In continuing with thoughts on why the chipset is not the sole deciding factor (unless you believe the marketing of a competitor out there), I give you another feature that has made the difference in several conferencing applications.

Polycom can support external user and authentication databases. So, ok, so what?

Well...I can give you several customer situations where this made a big difference.

1. A large customer has 50+k users out there. In typical video mcu architectures, you would need to go create 50+k meeting rooms. Of course...most mcus can't handle that many meeting rooms. So, in competing designs, you would have to create shared meeting rooms. Which from a user perspective would be very confusing and probably create conference security issues.

2. Say that large customer wants to deploy multiple MCUs to handle that load. If I was using competing boxes, I would either have to create all of these meetings rooms on all of the mcus...or I would manually split the meeting rooms across multiple mcus. Say, putting 1000 meeting rooms on bridge 1, the second 1000 on bridge 2, etc, etc, etc.

So... with external database support in Polycom mcus, I can setup the mcu to go off to a central database that holds all of the meeting room information. Now, this gives me lots of flexibility.

a. I can house the database on a clustered sql server for availability.

b. I don't have to create meeting rooms on any of the mcus. Nice...because if a mcu dies, i now have minimal rebuild time.

c. I can now also build a redundant mcu cluster where users can connect and I don't care which mcu they connect to. Of course...if you have load balanced mcus you also need to use another Polycom feature auto-cascade. But..if you are just going for a redundant (non-load balanced) solution, you don't need to deploy auto-cascade.

Really, you don't need 50K users to think about this feature. Even designs of under 1,000 would benefit.

We have one healthcare customer that enjoys the benefits of SSO (single sign on). With external database access, they were able to link meeting room creating to LDAP which allowed users to be authenticated and also managed from a single user database for every application (not just VTC) in their network.

Think about the user and think about the environment before you pick a video mcu. Just having he latest DSPs does NOT give you a solution!