Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is the current state of the art in this world of conferencing that we keep hearing about?Mr. Kaufhold: The state of the art is actually in flux. Everything is moving so quickly on so many different fronts that the opportunities are big and the directions are still being sorted out. There are probably three big trends that I see. The first one is video. It has actually become understood well enough that it can be literally 'bolted onto' voice and Web conferencing as, basically, an extension. For example, Cisco Systems (CSCO) has a product ' called the VT Advantage ' that let's you take a Cisco 7960 or 7970 series IP voice phone and hook up your computer on your desktop to the voice phone. And if you have got the Logitech (LOGI) camera and the application software on your computer, when you place a voice over IP call with your Cisco voice phone, it automatically detects that you have a video camera and computer hooked up to the phone. The person at the other end who answers the phone, if they have their IP voice phone hooked up to their computer and to their Webcam, and have the software installed, you have taken a basic voice over IP call and turned it into a voice over IP plus video plus Web conference call, all in one. So basically the way Cisco is approaching this, I guess the term I would use would be that video follows the voice. So basically anything you can do with a Cisco voice over IP phone from your office desktop can have video and computer screen content added to it, basically transparently.
TWST: So, as you say, things are moving?
Mr. Kaufhold: Yes. What Cisco has done is, they have cleared the way for
the video to follow what you would naturally do with your voice
telephone. That is one set of users. Now the other set of users are
people who basically start out not from the phone, but they start out
from their computer using something like an online meeting. That one is
from IBM (IBM), the IBM Workplace Managed Client. It is the equivalent
of a live meeting, and like in Microsoft Office, you also have Microsoft
Outlook, which manages your group communications. So this second group
of conferencing products starts with applications that are on your
computer. You have instant messaging and presence and email and ways to
set up an email or a computer-to-computer 'live' conference. Then the
next thing is, you want to add video and voice on top of those
applications. So if you are drawing this as a diagram, you would have
the voice follows video; that is basically using the telephone as the
primary instigator of a two-way call. This other group starts with a
computer using an instant messaging or presence application as the way
to start the call.
Tickers included in this excerpt: AVSR, CSCO, DWA, HPQ, IBM, LOGI, MSFT, PLCM, RVSN
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