What’s on the horizon for UC&C? Notes from Amsterdam and the Wainhouse Research UC&C Summit

I’ve recently returned from Amsterdam where Radisys was a sponsor of the Wainhouse Research UC&C Summit. It was a great opportunity to network with other industry professionals and to discuss trends and develop collaborative strategies. Previous events have centered on conferencing and collaboration, but Wainhouse is focused on a broader scope of unified communications instead of point solutions.

With enterprise customers deploying real-time voice and video and more unified communications suites, there were also many questions regarding on-premise vs. hosted solutions. It was insightful to discuss the pros and cons for different scenarios and multiple case studies emphasizing on-premise deployments were presented throughout the conference. Surprisingly however cloud services didn’t hold much of the spotlight.

Video for both mobile and web users was also a popular topic, including the emerging H.265 codec and WebRTC (and its supported codecs, including VP8 for video). . H.265 is bandwidth optimized for high-definition communications. Web Real-Time Communication, or WebRTC, enables browser based real-time communication, enabling browser to browser applications for voice calling, video chat and P2P file sharing without plugins.

The popularity of these new codecs at the conference shouldn’t be surprising because it really is a reflection of the industry. Video is emerging now because the network capacity and bandwidth are available; the increasing use of SIP trunking on the enterprise side and 4G/LTE on the mobile side are providing the architecture to handle video. But the increasing demand for video presents a need for high-density transcoding in the network. How can this issue be handled?

This is where the Radisys MRF (Media Resource Function) comes into play. The MRF is a fundamental element in an IP communications network, processing real-time audio and video media streams under the control of Application Servers (AS) in an IMS network. I encourage you to check out our whitepaper Transition to Cloud Video Conferencing (available to download here) to learn more about the future of video conferencing. Additionally you can learn more about our Software Media Server here for enterprise and IMS audio/video media processing applications, and our MPX-12000 Broadband MRF here.

About the Author

Al Balasco is the Head of Media, Core and Applications Business. Prior to his current role, he was the Sr. Director of Product Management for the Media Server business. Before joining Radisys in October 2010, Al was the Director of Product Management in Avaya Inc.’s Unified Communications business unit where he was responsible for the delivery of a variety of collaboration solutions and partnerships. Prior to Avaya, Mr. Balasco was the Vice President of Product Management at Spectel and was instrumental in defining the company’s VOIP conferencing and collaboration strategy. He also served as Director of Marketing for Sonexis Inc. and Director of Product Management at Brooktrout Software. Mr. Balasco has over 25 years of product management, business development and marketing experience in the telecommunications industry and has an MBA from Northeastern University in Boston.