IMTC’s Annual event is a meeting point of industry experts in the fields of video communication and interoperability. This year we decided to do a full day conference virtually, using available technologies. We are doing it because of three reasons:
1. This is the conference of the future: Though nothing can replace a handshake, virtual conferences are appealing from economic and efficiency perspective

2. This is what we do: IMTC is all about collaboration, unified communication, and content delivery. Virtual conference is best way to practice what we preach. We also would like to support our members by letting them showcase their technology in real life scenarios, and not only in booths and exhibitions.

3. This is the right thing in the current economic climate: With companies cutting their travel budgets, we should, as an industry organization, enable as many people possible to be a part of the experience. Virtual conference is a great solution for those who can’t travel, but still interested in the content or participants of the event. Also, in times when companies invest a lot in order to reduce their carbon footprint, virtual events are the way to go to help our planet a bit.

So what is the biggest challenge?

For me, the biggest challenge is not technical, but the experience :How can we prevent the conference from turning into a string of webinars or a list of audio presentations?How can we encourage people in the “audience” to interact with speakers and with each other?What should be the role of social platforms in the event?And how to make an extraordinary event, that pushes the boundaries of virtual conferences, with a shoe string budget?
Luckily, I am a part of a great team that is trying to make this project a reality, including Anatoli Levine from Radvision, Andrea Basso from AT&T, Shantanu Sarkar from Cisco, and many other volunteers.
Want to be a part of the effort to create the conference of the future? have  a relevant technology? Consider this as an open call for the industry and drop me an email at kfir AT Pravdam DOT com

To follow up on my previous post, I would like to continue talking about HD Voice. However, now I’m armed and dangerous – with the knowledge, that is. HD Communications Summit which took place on Thursday, May 21st, in New York City, brought together an outstanding line up of speakers with an amazing depth of knowledge on the subject. The event was organized by Jeff Pulver and Dan Berninger – both can be regarded as VoIP pioneers and experts on the subject.

So what did I learn?  A lot. One thing for sure – HD Voice is here. The technology is here. Yep, we know how to make everyone to sound better, juicier, more vivid and live. Challenge is – “we” is a small technical community. Nobody else knows – and nobody asks for it – therefore, it is not happening. Two excellent presentations, one by Jeff Rodman, Polycom‘s CTO, and  one by Martyn Humphries, GM of VoIP Group at Broadcom, very well explained and demonstrated the differences between regular telephone speech and HD Voice coming with all the live nuances. Nevertheless, many years of bad mobile calls taught us to ask for only two things – first, that your call will actually connect – and second, that it will not drop in a middle ( and if it does drop – start from the “first” again). Great quality voice – sure, will take it – but don’t ask us to pay for it – and again, the technology is not happening. It will require quite a bit of effort to educate and convince – Jeff Pulver’s idea to petition  for “HDV” campaign with FCC is good – still, just don’t drop my calls, please…

Another interesting revelation for me was the fact HD Voice is more than just a codec. Having spend many years at RADVISION, where video is king, the screen by itself is practically always good, the key to the good quality video is really in the mathematical wonders of the codec. Not the case with audio – while codec is important, what can be described by single word acoustics is equally or more important – it is choice of materials and actual mechanical design of the earpiece or a headset, or speakers will actually determine if HD voice will be actually HD. I guess this actually make sound delivery more art compare to a video delivery? Huh, I’m working for the video company in the end of the day, I guess need to be more careful with conclusions.

So for the quick recap – technology is ready, we mastered the art of sound, there is no demand, am I missing anything else? Yeah, technology is ready, and the problem is – too much of it. There is at least twice as many wideband codecs than narrow band codecs. Great selection of not-interoperable codecs! Of course that makes transcoding very important, but also prevents us from leaping forward, as we can’t achieve level of deployable interoperability. G.722 everyone, please!

Here is another recap – technology is ready, we mastered the art of sound, there is no demand, and interoperability is not where it should be.

As I’m wearing two hats here, what it all means? For RADVISION, we will continue to make the picture better and brighter – it worth thousand words anyway, right? However, clear Voice (HD, it is) greatly enhances the picture, so we gladly embrace the “complete HD experience” momentum in the industry. For IMTC, it sounds like a textbook case of “what IMTC does the best” – we can get together all the players in the industry, create base profile and test plan, run interoperability testing, create excitement with amazing clarity of the voice, educate the market and declare a victory! Sounds simple? I hope it is. Let’s start…

Written By Anatoli Levine, IMTC President and Director, Product Management – Americas at RADVISION

Who heard of High Definition Video? Oh yes, thank you, so silly of me, of course everybody did – walk into any electronics store, and admire – clear, bright, juicy picture, hundreds of HDTVs of all sizes smiling at you, all at the same time. We like it and want to use it daily..
But what about audio? We had High Definition audio (remember what Hi-Fi stands for?) way back – in the times when you needed a few close friends giving you a hand with 25” TV being brought in the house, High Definition sound was abundantly available, so we did experience and we do know what good sound quality is.

So let’s connect the dots. This blog is about Internet Communications, also widely known as VoIP. On cell phones, we are used to crappy voice quality and dropped calls – and we don’t even get irritated after so many years of training. Regular telephony, delivered over analog or PSTN, is almost an apogee of goodness – at least it was until few years ago. Yes, yes, nowadays VoIP is reliably deployable and we can enjoy the same voice quality as in PSTN.
But is it time for the new experience? Enters HD Communications Summit.
When I talked to Dan Berninger a few months back, when he started planning of the Summit, my initial reaction to HD Voice idea was – why do we need it? Reliable calls – of course, but what’s wrong with PSTN quality? Well, as Dan rightfully noted, we don’t know what we don’t know – as we didn’t have a chance to experience HD Voice in our daily communications, we don’t know what we are missing.
So I’m looking forward to the Summit which will take place in New York City on May 21st with the hope to find some answers. Will my presentations to the customers more convincing, if delivered in HD Voice? What codecs should be used? What’s the economic rationale behind this technology, and how would we maintain interoperability in this new space? What will be the psychological effects of this new technology? I’m sure answers will be found in the lively discussions.
There is one more thing I’m really curious about – as today we need an option of answering calls with or without video (early morning ad hoc video call? brrrr, I’ll pass, thank you), will we need a new option to decide if we want answer a voice call in HD or not?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Pulver: Time to reboot the communications industry (pulverblog.pulver.com)
• High Definition to Crash the Voice Party (gigaom.com)

Social networks are no longer the sole domain of consumers and artists. LinkedIn and Facebook could provide benefit to business users – as well as change the way they learn about they competitors, and interact with employees, and partners. How does these players affect enterprise communication needs Panelists: Peter Saint-Andre, Director of Standards, Jabber & Anatoli Levine, Director of Product Management, RADVISION,  and IMTC President.

Moderator: Kfir Pravda, VP Marketing IMTC, CEO Pravda Media

We have great speakers at the event – starting with Joe Burton, CTO of unified communication group in Cisco, Matt Collier, SVP of LifeSize communications, Ty Wang, Senior director of Product Marketing at Oracle, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho, Hakon Dahla, CTO of Tandberg, and Anatoli Levine, IMTC President. The event covers both cutting edge technologies (such as the world beyond H264, Scalable video coding today, and conformance methodologies) as well as business issues such as unified communication beyond click to call, social networks and the enterprise, Multimedia and tele-health and many more.

It is an exciting event, taking place in an exciting location – St. Regis hotel in San Francisco (personally I am asking myself where is the nearest Apple store, after today’s announcements). I am moderating several panels in the first day, and will be there through the event.

If you are in this business, or want to meet in San Francisco, you should come and say Hi. Here is the agenda, and you can register here.

My CEO swears by Yahoo messenger. My R&D guys swear by Jabber. We have Cisco Call Manager connecting our offices in 15 countries and providing seamless voice connectivity. We use Polycom room systems in most of our conference room, however some of new Tandberg devices we connected just recently, also work quite well. We just equipped two of our boardrooms with brand new Telepresence systems from Telanetix. And our support department is really happy with their decision to use Skype to allow customers call in with questions for any place in the world. My Sales department is demanding that each sales director is always reachable on one and the same number, whether inside or outside of the corporate office, so I need to find an FMC solution for them. By now you probably figured that I’m in charge of information systems in my company, so I’m really the one who have to make this all work together. And hh yes, yesterday my friends got really upset with me – I didn’t have twitter installed on my brand corporate smartphone, so we couldn’t chat during the football game.

Sounds far fetching? I don’t think so. Today’s enterprise deploys myriad complex communications tools and technologies, all of which should function in concert. Does it always? No, not really, there is lots of work required and no success is guaranteed. What can help here? IMTC is proposing to define a reference architecture, a deployment blueprint which will define a minimum technological profile for the prospective equipment and recommend potential design of the network to make all the pieces to interoperate smoothly and successfully. Want to learn more about it? Come to VON.x in San Jose this week and participate in IMTC Panel “Reference Architectures for Content Delivery & Unified Communications” which will take place on Thursday, March 20 from 1:30pm – 2:45pm.

Well, these times are long gone. Today, technology is disrupting the whole industry – and its value chain. Content creators are making new innovative media products for a fraction of the cost, and distribute it independently. Availability of high bandwidth across networks poses a dilemma to service provider regarding their role in the market place, and which infrastructure will support an unclear future. Users consume media in various shapes and forms – often with intrusive content protection methods that affect their rights.

IMTC Forum will discuss these issues and more, with thought leaders from companies such as Radvision, Cisco, AT&T, BEA, Avaya, RealNetworks, FWD, and independent content creators. Panels cover perspectives of each industry player – vendors, users, content creators, service providers, and the link between content delivery and unified communication.

The event, a Fall VON pre-conference, is taking place in Boston on the 29th of October. Come to say Hello, and be a part of a controversial and insightful conversation.

(Cross posted here)

Technorati Tags: AT&T , att , radvision , cisco , bea , realnetworks , IMTC , content delivery , convergance , von

The first interoperability event for the IMS Activity Group, and now the real work begins. We know where we are and what we want to achieve.

There were 6 of us there. Companies with implementations of video share. It seems like each one has interpreted what are the requirements on the SIP level a bit differently, and this caused some issues. We had issues in various messages that were sent as well as with accessing and registering to a P-CSCF (a SIP server). I wouldn’t delve here into details, but I’d like to say that we’ve made some good progress this week.

The general feeling in the group is that now we have substance to talk about, and a lot of work ahead of us.

So what’s next?

1. We need to start drafting out the baseline scenario test case with as much detail as possible – especially in the areas where we found issues between companies. Having that would assist us in our next steps and will provide a good starting point for new members.
2. Outline the requirements from operators and IMS core networks. We had some issues with the 3G network we used and its firewall configurations. As we plan to have more events in the future, we better get these requirements into an official working document for our group.
3. See if we can somehow find a solution that would allow our group to test not only during face to face events, but also remotely throughout the year.
4. We’re already planning the next event. We’re targeting the beginning of 2008 for it. I am sure we will make good progress there.

Technorati Tags: IMTC, IMS, Video Share, Interoperability, Tsahi Levent-Levi, F2F

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It’s about time this happened. We’ve been working for several months now in the IMTC IMS AG for this moment – the first face-to-face interoperability event of our group.

Why is this important?

Up until today, no real IMS testing was done for the client side in any methodical way. Sure, the IMS Forum is doing PlugFest events and the GSMA is also doing some basic interoperability testing for their specification. Nevertheless, there’s no real place where handset vendors and middleware/software providers for handsets can gather around on a regular basis and deal with interoperability. The IMS AG is just that place.

What do we focus on?

We currently deal with Video Share as an IMS service that we are testing, focusing on the client itself. Not what is required on the network side and how billing is done but rather how two mobile clients can call each other, negotiate the parameters they will use for the call and share a video session between each other. We will be moving on to additional client-side service aspects as they develop – we started with Video Share simply because it seems like one of the services of IMS that will be deployed first – I believe AT&T is the first of many operators that will focus on Video Share in the next couple of months.

What do we do?

We talk once a week or two, depending on availability. Companies in the group join a conference call to discuss matters at hand. In these calls we discuss a wide range of topics:

• Drafting out our test case document
• Establishing and discussing liaison connections with other organizations (GSMA, IMS Forum, OMTP and others)
• Scheduling interoperability events

Our goal?

To make sure that once operators decide to deploy services such as Video Share, they will be able to choose any phone vendor they want and be confident of the level of interoperability provided. This means that operators would rather take handsets from vendors who are actually test interoperability in the IMTC IMS AG.

October interoperability event

Our first event is scheduled for October 10-12 this year. RADVISION, my company, is hosting this event along with the 3G-324M AG, which will do their own interoperability testing there.

We are planning to convene after the event and publish the first official test cases document for Video Share from the IMTC. As usual, I am sure we will have some comments to the 3GPP and the GSMA that might require some clarifications or changes to the specifications – that happens when an activity group in the IMTC starts doing interoperability and places a specification under its magnifying glass…

If you do develop communication products, you must know that interoperability is important. What do you do to close this gap of interoperability in your products?

Technorati Tags: IMTC, IMS, IMS Client, Video Share, GSMA, IMS Forum, OMTP, 3GPP, Interoperability, 3G-324M, Tsahi Levent-Levi

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On October 8 -12, the company that I work in, RADVISION, is going to host the next IMTC 3G-324M AG F2F event in Tel-Aviv, Israel, and I am in charge of the organization of the event. This is not the first time RADVISION organizes such an event. The first event took place on February 2006 and yet the upcoming event is exciting just as much and even more.

I participated in many IMTC F2F events in the past 5 years and I traveled to many countries but hosting an event in your home country is completely different feeling. The fact that many people from different companies, countries and cultures get together in one place and work together is something wonderful but when it happens in your home field it is even more wonderful.

I very much enjoy hosting these people which I consider friends, telling them about my country, showing them the holy places, elaborating on the local customs and introducing them to the local food. This is amazing time and again to see their reaction to that. This makes me very proud in my country and very enthusiastic to show more and more.

In the previous event we visited in the holiest place in Israel – Jerusalem. This time we are going to visit in Caesarea. Our goal is to improve the hosting from event to event and so we have some more surprises this time that I am not going to tell otherwise I will spoil the surprise.

And yes, we are even going to work here between visits and test 3G-324M devices. But, I am sure that the special atmosphere and the activities around the event will ease the pressure of the work and make it more pleasant.

I hope that more and more people even from companies outside IMTC read this post and decide to join the event. I hope to see you F2F next month in the Holy Land…

Technorati Tags: 3G-324M, F2F, IMTC, RADVISION, Oren Libis, Interoperability

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